Gender Swapped By Aliens! Page 4

  “Yes, ma’am,” one of the cops said like an obedient servant.

  “Stop! Please!” I wailed. It didn’t do me any good. They tossed me back onto the bunk. The door hissed shut before I could get up. When it shut, the door completely disappeared, not leaving any handles or seams I might use to get out. I looked around for a window or airshaft or anything else that could get me out of here. There was nothing.

  With a groan I collapsed on my bunk. I began to shiver. I didn’t know how long I could last, but I wasn’t going to give in to these bastards.

  ***

  While the previous few days had been a blissful haze, the next few felt like a year had gone by. The itchiness became a lot worse. I developed a fever, cramps, diarrhea, nausea, and a host of other nasty symptoms. I began to see imaginary bugs, snakes, and rodents in my cell. I would periodically scream when these vermin would start to crawl on me.

  Without a window, clock, or calendar, I had no way to know how many days went by until the door finally opened. Only one of the cops stood there; they probably didn’t think I needed more than one. “You’re looking well,” he joked.

  “Fuck…off,” I rasped. They had slipped water in through a narrow opening that like the door itself quickly disappeared; still my throat felt like sandpaper.

  I was glad for his assistance in getting me down the hallway as my legs were wobbly from the days of isolation. He shoved me back into Room 5, leaving me in a heap on the floor. That cultured female voice said, “Welcome back, Miss Fontaine.”

  “What…you…want?”

  “It seems that despite the severe pains you’ve endured, you are still resisting our efforts to recalibrate your thought patterns. It is simply unbelievable.”

  “Now what? I…die?”

  “Perhaps that would be a blessing for you at this point, but no. If your family is the root of this resistance, then putting you back in a family unit might alleviate the problems.”

  “You…give back…my family?”

  “Not exactly.”

  The air around me shimmered. The pain as my body started to change was actually a relief after the past few days. I found my limbs getting skinnier, the skin firming up and turning extremely pale. My nails shortened slightly and then turned a glossy black. Tattoos drew themselves in black along my flesh. I had a good idea what was happening to me even before my clothes changed to a short black top with mesh sleeves, lacy black gloves, a tiny black leather skirt, and tall black leather boots. There were sharp pains in my ears, eyebrows, lip, nose, and even between my legs. As pain flared in my tongue, I could taste a metallic tang—a tongue piercing.

  A wave of pink fell over my right eye. I brushed a hand through hair that had become shorter in the back and a lot less poofy on top. The left side was mostly shaved off, only stubble remaining. It was the sort of style that went with the clothes, tattoos, and piercings.

  I got unsteadily to my feet to see a Goth girl looking back at me in the mirror. The yellow eye—actually yellow—that was visible had black smeared around it. My puffy lips were just as black, contrasting sharply with the chalk white of my skin. The pains I had felt were from silver rings in my eyebrows, nose, lip, belly button, and I was pretty sure one on my labia. My ears had a mixture of studs and rings, nearly a dozen in each ear. The tattoos ranged in styles from Chinese characters to skulls, to a heart surrounded in barbed wire over my belly button.

  Leaning closer, this pale, pierced face still had the pudginess of a teenager. I was probably seventeen at most. “I’m a kid!” I whined. “You promised me a family.”

  “I promised you would be part of a family. And you will be.” She waved her hand and then the air rippled again—

  I felt a vibration beneath me. I blinked a few times and then realized I was on the backseat of what was probably an SUV from the size. There was a seatbelt over my waist. I squinted, trying to see who was behind the wheel. It didn’t seem to be one of the cops from earlier.

  A woman turned around in the passenger’s seat. I gasped to recognize my own mother, albeit about thirty years younger than she had been. With her dark hair pulled into a long ponytail, glasses perched on her nose, and wearing a down vest with a sweater, she looked as she had when we went skiing at Tahoe when I was fifteen.

  “Hi there, sweetie. Welcome back.”

  “Mom?” Despite how tough I looked on the outside, my voice was still the baby doll voice of when I had been a secretary.

  “You still remember me, don’t you? It’s only been twenty-eight days.”

  I gulped. Twenty-eight days. That was the usual amount of time for someone to stay in a rehab clinic. Apparently this me—whoever I was—had been hooked on heroin or something else, to the point her parents took her to rehab.

  “I’m just a little out of it yet,” I mumbled.

  “As soon as you’re back home, you’ll feel right as rain,” Mom said, her grin broadening.

  Already I could feel a teenager’s embarrassment at her parent’s goofiness. It was something I had felt the last time I was this age. My own kids had been going through it before the Zargon Empire showed up.

  “They could have at least gotten all that crap off your face,” my father grumbled from the front seat.

  “She’s expressing herself, Ted,” Mom said.

  “It’s that crowd she was hanging around with who got her hooked on the junk.”

  “I’m right here, you know,” I whined in perfect teenaged fashion.

  “Your father doesn’t mean to be so rude. We were just hoping you might have decided to make a few…changes.”

  “You mean to look normal?”

  “Just a teensy bit, sweetie.”

  “Whatever.” I turned to look out the window. I had no idea where we were, but it was not the city. This was the suburbs, where I had grown up. Where I had raised my family—

  “Are you crying, sweetie?” Mom asked.

  “No,” I squeaked. I tried to wipe the tears as discreetly as possible. I knew what they were doing to me; they were giving me a different family in the hope that it would sate my need to be with Denise and our kids. It wasn’t going to work. I wasn’t going to let it.

  ***

  The SUV pulled into the driveway for an anonymous split-level ranch house in a subdivision. I unbuckled my seatbelt and then scooted over to climb out. I had barely gotten my boots on the driveway pavement when I felt someone hugging me around the waist.

  “Billie!” a tiny voice squealed. “You’re home!”

  “Um, yeah, I’m home.” I looked down to see a little girl who looked like a miniature version of my mother. “Karen?”

  “You remember!” My sister squeezed me even tighter.

  “Well yeah, ya dink. I’ve only been gone a month.”

  She let go of me to pout. From the missing front teeth, she was probably only six years old at this point. “I’m not a dink!”

  “Whatever,” I said, but then I tousled her hair.

  Karen seized my hand. “Come on, I wanna show you my new toys!”

  “Karen, don’t hound your sister,” Mom snapped. “She’s probably very tired after that drive.”

  “Sorry, Mommy.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. I forced myself to smile. “Show me your room.”

  As I let her lead me through the bland suburban house, I wished I could find one of those aliens to punch it in the face. They were crossing a line by bringing Karen back. In the world I remembered, Karen had died when she was fifteen when a classmate crashed the car she was riding in. There had been ice and fog, so the kids shouldn’t have even been on the road, but Karen was always so sweet that she wouldn’t dream of asking Mom or Dad for a ride and I was hundreds of miles away at college. I foolishly blamed myself for her death, as if my being around might have saved her.

  Yet now here she was, just the way I remembered when she was a little girl. Only back then I had been her older brother, not her sister. She had still called me Billy in those days,
which in a way made it worse.

  Her room looked like that of most any spoiled suburban girl, with toys scattered all over the place. She picked up a couple of plastic horses to wave in my face. As she chattered about them, I nodded along. When I was her older brother I would have snatched the toys away to hold over her head until she cried. That was routine bullying for an older brother, especially when he was six years older than his sister.

  “Doesn’t this one look like you?” Karen asked. She waved a Monster High doll in my face. It too had pink hair and white skin, though it also had cat ears and whiskers.

  “It sort of does. Except the ears.”

  Karen giggled. Then she thrust the doll into my hands. “You keep it.”

  “I can’t—”

  “You gotta. I want you to have it.”

  Her lower lip trembled to indicate she was about to cry. I sighed and then took the doll. “Thanks, kid. Hey, you think you can show me where my room is? I forgot.”

  “You’re silly,” Karen chirped. Then she took my hand to lead me a couple of doors down. Even without Karen’s assistance I could have guessed it was mine from the posters for hard rock bands on the door.

  There were a lot more posters on the walls, along with ones featuring pentagrams and other Satanic elements. I was sure the room was a lot cleaner than usual, with all the clothes put away and DVDs, CDs, books, and so forth stacked up neatly. I would probably rectify this within a few days.

  I gratefully dropped onto the black comforter with its black sheets underneath. I waved the doll at Karen. “Kitty and I are going to take a nap.”

  “OK.” Karen waited a moment and then raced over to the bed to give me a sneaky kiss on the cheek. She giggled happily as she skipped away, closing the door behind her.

  I shook my head and then set the doll aside. I looked up at the ceiling, the poster of a bare-chested hunk staring down at me. All things considered, this didn’t seem like a bad life. My parents were young again. My sister was alive. I was an emotionally disturbed former junkie, but I could probably get past that in time.

  All I needed to do was let go of Denise, Michael, and Tammy. I shook my head. Never.

  ***

  I woke up to Mom calling me down for dinner. I rolled off the bed, glad in a way to see the black clothes, pale skin, and abundance of tattoos and piercings. I didn’t want to be a teenage Goth girl, but at least I hadn’t changed into something worse during my nap.

  My steps were still wobbly as I trudged downstairs, into the dining room. As soon as I saw the mound of meat on a platter, my nose wrinkled. “Meatloaf? Gross,” I whined.

  “You used to like meatloaf,” Mom said.

  “When I was like Karen’s age.”

  “Just sit down and eat,” Dad said. “All you’ve put us through, be lucky you get anything at all.”

  I dropped onto the empty place setting on one side of the table. I crossed my arms over my chest and huffed. Really, meatloaf? I didn’t like it even when I was a grown man. I had eaten it a couple of times for Denise’s sake, but I never enjoyed the experience.

  Mom dropped a brick of the pseudo-meat on my plate. She put an arm around my shoulders to give me a squeeze. “You need to put some meat on these bones. You’ve gotten so skinny!”

  “Good.”

  She shoveled mashed potatoes and peas onto the plate and then drowned both in gravy. At the head of the table, Dad shoveled his food into his mouth. Karen ate hers more tentatively, offering bites to the baby doll sitting next to her; when the doll refused, she would eat it herself for illustrative purposes. Mom finally sat at the other end of the table to begin nibble at her food.

  “Aren’t you going to eat anything?” Mom asked after a minute.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Eat your dinner, young lady,” Dad said.

  “I said I’m not hungry.”

  “Your mother worked hard on this dinner and I worked hard paying for it. You eat it or I’ll make you.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Dad threw down his napkin. He glared hard at me. “You’re not so big that I can’t whip your ass.”

  “Ted! Your father doesn’t mean it, sweetie—”

  “The hell I don’t. She’s needed a good whipping for a long time. Look at her. It’s disgusting.”

  It was my turn to throw down my napkin. I shot to my feet. “The hell with this. I don’t need you or your food.”

  I didn’t know where I would go, but at the moment I didn’t care. I stomped out of the dining room, towards the front door. Before I could get there, I felt someone grab me around the waist.

  “Don’t go!” Karen wailed. “Please?”

  She pressed her face into my stomach; from the way her shoulders shook, I knew she was sobbing. I gently rubbed her back. “Hey, it’s all right, kid. I’m not going anywhere.”

  I groaned as I picked her up. She started to sob against my cheek. “You went away before.”

  “I was sick. I had to go get better.”

  She looked up at me with teary eyes. “You promise you won’t leave?”

  “I promise.”

  My arms were beginning to quiver from her weight, so I had to set her back down. I kept hold of her hand to walk her to the dining room. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s all right, sweetie,” Mom said. “I can make you something else—”

  “It’s OK,” I said. I let Karen’s hand go to sit at my seat. I still didn’t like the meatloaf, but I forced myself to eat every bite—even the crust. I ate the potatoes and peas as well, though by the time I was halfway my stomach felt ready to burst.

  Karen watched me eat, as if worried I might slip out if she stopped watching me. As soon as I finished, she scurried over with her doll to take my hand. “Mommy, can we go watch TV now?”

  “Sure, sweetie. Bedtime is still eight o’clock, though.”

  “Yes, Mommy.” Karen looked up at me to flash a gap-toothed grin. “Come on!”

  She put the latest Pixar movie in the DVD player and then curled up with me on the couch. It was hard to remember the last time I had spent time like this with my sister. There had never really been this kind of intimacy when I was a boy; it’s different between brothers and sisters.

  Karen began to doze about halfway through the movie. Her eyes would drift shut and then open with a start a few minutes later before repeating the process. She really was so adorable. It was hard to believe she could have been dead for over twenty years. I wondered if I could consider this Karen real or not. Was she a fabrication created by the aliens? Or could their machines actually alter time to bring back the dead?

  There was so much about this I didn’t understand. Even if the aliens deemed to tell me, I probably still wouldn’t have understood. I had taken physics and astronomy in college, but this involved the sort of quantum mechanics only a Stephen Hawking could decipher.

  But as Karen dozed in my lap, I had to admit it didn’t really matter. She was alive and we could have a relationship never possible before. Maybe I could call that ample compensation for losing Denise and my children. That was certainly what the aliens were hoping for.

  I couldn’t give it to them. I had to stay strong. I shook Karen awake. “Hey, dink. It’s time to go to bed.”

  “I’m not sleepy,” she whined.

  “Yeah, right. Get going before Daddy paddles your butt.”

  “Will you tuck me in?”

  “Sure. But only after you brush your teeth and all that.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “You better or those teeth aren’t going to grow back.”

  “OK.” I helped her off the couch and then took her hand to lead her upstairs. She knew the way to the bathroom and which toothbrush was hers, so I let her take the lead. She handed a purple toothbrush to me. It was early to brush my teeth, but I figured it would help to encourage her if she saw her big sister doing it.

  Once we finished brushing and rinsing with mouthwash, I let Karen take
me back to her room. She dug out a pink flannel nightgown to change into. As a little girl, she had no hesitation about undressing in front of her older sister. It was hard to resist the temptation to blow a raspberry on her pale little potbelly; she was a few years too old for that.

  I groaned theatrically as I swung her onto the bed with her doll. From raising two kids, I knew how to tuck her in securely, but not too tight. I bent down to kiss her on the forehead. “Goodnight, kid.”

  “Goodnight, Billie.” She yawned and then asked, “Will you be here tomorrow?”

  “Of course.”

  “OK then.” She rolled over to drift off into sleep. I couldn’t help studying her for a minute or two. Then I turned out the light.

  Mom waited for me in the hallway. “That was very nice,” she said. “Karen has missed you so much. We all have.”

  “I’m not sure about Daddy.”

  “You know how he is, but he has missed you. Trust me.”

  “I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused.”

  “It’s all right. You’re young. Kids think they know everything.”

  I smiled at her. It was hard to remember when I had ever talked like this with my mother. Again, probably never. It’s different between mothers and daughters than mothers and sons. She pulled me into a hug and then kissed the top of my head. She started to laugh.

  “What?”

  “I thought maybe your hair would taste different, maybe like cotton candy.”

  “God, Mom.”

  “I’m sorry.” She let me go and then motioned down the hall. “Your pajamas are in the bottom drawer. Don’t forget to take your contacts out before you go to bed. You know how your eyes get when you leave them in.”

  “I’ll remember, Mom. God.” The moment was gone now, leaving us as harried mother and petulant daughter again. I stomped into my bedroom. It would be a couple of hours before I went to bed, but I decided to get out my pajamas anyway.

  There were a couple of nightgowns like Karen’s, probably leftover from my preteen days. I opted for an oversized Metallica T-shirt. It felt good to get the boots off, along with the stockings and leather skirt.