Surrogate
By
Maria Rachel Hooley
Surrogate
© 2012 Maria Rachel Hooley
Original cover photo by Chastity Ijames
Cover by Phatpuppy Art
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—except for brief quotations in printed reviews—without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
One moment, Carrie Williams is eight months pregnant and driving to meet her husband Robbie. The next, a silver streak rushes into her car's path. Carrie tries to turn the wheel, resulting in a horrific accident. It is in Carrie's dying moments that she sees the alien, an explorer from a race who doesn’t believe humans exist. After the alien almost collides with car, she senses the small life form in Carrie's body and merges her form with that dying human body to save a life, unaware how that single choice will change everything for both races.
Chapter One
Dusk burned itself into the late summer sky, and the sun set fire to the heavens, burnishing the clouds in shades of orange and gold. Oh, it was beautiful all right, but it was blinding, as well, Carrie Williams thought, squinting as she drove into the light. Granted, she was on a dirt road barely wide enough for two cars. No one ever really drove down it except her and her husband. There wasn’t much out in the direction of their house, ten miles south of Kilbrough, Oregon, the nearest town. Still, Carrie prided herself on being safe, and, as her free hand reached down and smoothed the dress over her full belly, she knew she had a reason to keep staying safe.
“I think I need my sunglasses,” she whispered, reaching for the glove box. Yes, she should've kept them closer at hand, but she was lucky she'd even remembered to stow them in the car at all. Her fingers fumbled for them, and she’d barely shut the glove box when her cell began to ring.
Glancing at the display, she saw Robbie’s picture lighting the screen. He was probably looking for her and with good reason: she was an hour late and had a bad habit of not checking in. He’d merely been grumpy about that before she’d gotten pregnant, but now he was overbearing about it, and she tried to humor him. Today, she’d been shopping for his birthday present, and time had slipped past unnoticed.
She gauged how long it would take for her to get to the house versus whether she should answer the phone--not that she wanted to because she was driving--but he was probably out of his mind with worry, and she had been negligent. It was getting late. She should've been home long ago.
The phone kept ringing. “Crap,” she muttered and reached for her phone. Of course, her fingers pushed the cell off onto the floorboard.
Carrie glanced at the road, checking to make sure no other vehicles were coming as she undid her seatbelt. The road was clear, and the phone was still ringing. The one sure way to make Robbie get into his truck and drive to find her would be not answering. If he were worried, he wouldn’t just wait for her to get home, which meant she’d better go ahead and get it.
Holding her breath, she bent lower so her fingertips touched the phone, trying to grab it, but she wasn’t close enough, so she had to reach farther, sighing as her hand finally wrapped around its slick plastic surface. She didn’t like the way the car wobbled along, bumping down the road, and as she started to sit upright, she caught a glint of bright light in front of her, blinding her.
Horrified, she hit the brakes. The car suddenly started to slide as the flash of light blurred out of her way. What was that? she wondered, yet the next few seconds proved it didn’t matter. Her car suddenly began to flip over and over, leaving the road and heading toward a pasture. Her body bounced around the interior of the car with every motion, and her screams abruptly died to a whimper as the car finally came to a stop, Carrie still inside the mangled fiberglass body that had crumpled around her, crushing her legs.
Pain ripped through her body in every direction, and even though her eyes were open, everything was blurry and distorted. There was a haze she couldn’t explain, and even breathing was almost too much.
The baby, she thought, immediately trying to move her arms, but her body wouldn’t obey even the simplest command. Fresh pain shot through her while trying to free her hands from wherever they were trapped. She couldn’t even see enough to tell.
A shiver ran through her, and Carrie knew that was a bad sign. It was August. She should be burning up. She finally managed to clear some of the haze and discovered the problem: there was blood everywhere—her blood.
A wordless, desperate cry escaped her, and she wondered how much blood she’d lost and how much more she could stand to lose before…. Tears pricked her eyes as panic set it. No, it wasn’t about her. All she could think of was the baby who had never had a chance to take his or her first breath, the baby neither she nor Robbie had been willing to discover the gender of. They'd wanted a surprise.
Just not this surprise.
Tears began flowing down her face, and she forced herself to look at her abdomen, worried she’d find something had impaled her side, killing the child already—the child they’d worked for years to conceive. Despite her fears, it seemed the only part of her body that remained unharmed had been her abdomen, which meant the baby had a chance.
That was all that mattered.
Carrie groaned while trying to force her hand to the door handle, every movement slow and painful. It seemed to take hours just to set her fingers on it, yet tugging on it was another story. While she could now move, trying to gather enough strength to pull seemed beyond her.
“I have to get out.” She whispered the words, but they came out as a mish-mash of sound that made no sense. Certainly no one would have understood what she’d said had they heard her.
But there was no one to hear her--no one to save this baby.
You have to do this, she thought. There’s no one else.
Tears burned their way down Carrie's face, but she barely noticed them. The pain now was so much worse, and she whimpered. After five tries, she still couldn't get the door open, and while part of her was frustrated, the other part was already thinking of the hell she was about to endure, trying that much harder. If moving so little hurt so much, it was about to get a whole lot worse.
Carrie took a deep breath and started to swing her legs in that direction, yet, no matter what she did, she couldn't move the lower half of her body. Gritting her teeth, she tried harder. That's when the pain gripped her so tightly, she actually cried out.
Her breathing had dwindled to shallow gasps that scarcely gave her enough air, and she thought she might pass out. Her vision started to cloud over, and Carrie shook her head, trying to stay conscious as she looked down at her legs. They were mangled in the wreckage. There was still more blood.
This time, a keening wail tore the silence around her, and it took a moment before Carrie even realized she'd been the one making that inhuman sound.
The only thing that stopped her screaming was the sudden tightening that spread through her abdomen. Carrie gulped air and forced her hand to rise and resettle on her belly. The tension seemed to go on forever before it finally stopped, and she knew just by the way the feeling spread across her stomach it had been a real contraction, not a Braxton-Hicks. Not only was she bleeding to death, she was also in labor two months early, and judging by the way the lower half of her body was compactly joined with the metal, even if a fire truck were here with the Jaws of Life, she wasn't sure they could get her out in time.
More tears streamed down Carrie's face, and for the first time, she knew she was going to die--and her baby was going to die with her. There was nothing to be done about it.
Her body shuddered with pain and grie
f, and she thought of Robbie and how alone he would be. He'd always been strong, but this would be too much to ask of him; it would kill him, too.
Carrie was so lost in the pain and fear she didn't see the streak of light flowing toward her, the same silver streak that had caused the collision. Still, even if she had noticed and made the connection, it wouldn't have mattered. Now nothing did.
"Help me!" she tried yelling, but her voice was weak at best, and she couldn't breathe deeply enough to gain much volume. She looked at the hood, making sure that she didn't see any flames rising from it. No, it wasn't on fire at least.
From behind the car, the light source lengthened into a form that seemed recognizable, at least in the way all humans seem the same in their sunny-day shadows. It had arms and legs, a head and such, but it was ghostly pale to the extent it seemed surreal. She could see through it. Its features were long and stretched like taffy on a warm day. The eyes were milky white orbs that seemed covered by cataracts. It had no substance, and it was coming toward the car.
It was getting harder to breathe by the minute, and she was getting colder as the blood seeped from her body, saturating the seat. Her eyes kept trying to close, and she found that now she couldn't really even move, almost like her body was giving up--shutting down.
Carrie's voice gave out before she realized she'd shouted for the last time, but she still opened her mouth, desperate. It was too late for her, but not the baby. Please, God, not the baby.
Carrie felt herself swimming towards darkness that reached for her, and she couldn't fight it off forever. No, it was coming, and she'd all but given in to it when she saw it, the bright being spun of sunlight and mist, of shadow and dream. It stood outside, staring at her with those big, milky eyes.
At first, Carrie thought it must be Death, but something seemed off; this creature was just as surprised to find her there as she was to find it. Besides, she'd pictured him so differently--an elegantly dressed gentleman like Edgar Allan Poe, and had Carrie been stronger, she might have laughed at her own stupidity.
The being stared at her face first and then cocked its head to one side, like it was listening for something only it could hear.
Carrie wanted to speak, to ask it something, but her voice wouldn't come, and her body felt so heavy as though it were dragging her into a great darkness threatening to consume her.
She kept blinking, her eyes closing longer each time than the last, so she almost missed it when the being slowly reached out, brought its ghostly hand to her belly, and settled it there, its head still cocked.
Part of her wanted to fight, but she couldn't; she was too weak. She had no energy left to spend, and she wondered if the baby were seeing the same darkness that now crept upon her.
In a last ditch effort, Carrie forced herself to move. She thought if she tried to set her own hand over the being's hers would just go through it; after all, it looked transparent enough. Nonetheless, it didn't happen. Instead, it met something warm and soft.
In that instant, Carrie's world suddenly exploded into a million memories not her own. They didn't belong to any human. Such was an image overload of beings much like the one standing here, and she saw the earth not as one who'd lived here all her life but one who'd dreamed of a lengthy voyage here to determine whether other life existed.
Tears pricked her eyes, and Carrie took a labored breath. She gripped the creature's hand, surprised when it squeezed back. The being nodded to Carrie's swelled belly.
"My baby," Carrie whispered. They both looked at it. A lance of pain cut through her then, severing her ties to the only world she'd ever known.
Chapter Two
Why couldn't the call had come yesterday during someone else's shift? Dallas Stanton wondered as he drove the ambulance toward his next call as he turned onto a dirt road just ahead. Although he tried to relax against the seat, his back was tied up in knots and he felt like he couldn't breathe. He kept thinking about the last time he saw a wreck this bad had been his wife's--Debra's.
Dallas hated car wrecks with a passion. As an EMT who had worked in Rochester, New York for two years before moving to Kilbrough a year ago, Dallas Stanton had sworn he'd seen everything, yet nothing ever got to him the way car wrecks did, and that was what made him leave the fast lane behind. That and the death of his pregnant wife.
He'd transferred to Kilbrough because it was a little town where the worst thing that happened was the town folk sleeping in and sometimes missing Reverend McMichael's sermon. Now according to small-town life, that was bad, but not like the gang warfare and drivebys of New York. And certainly not the drunk drivers who killed people. People like his wife.
Those thoughts might have gone on forever had Jose, his partner, not pointed to the battered red Toyota which had obviously flipped many times before slamming into a tree and crunching the front of the car into the body.
Dallas parked the ambulance and the two EMTs got out and rushed toward it.
"Hell, I know that car," Dallas murmured, trying to remember why the vehicle was so familiar and who owned it. It didn't help it was beyond totaled, and the driver's door had been ripped away, rather like the Jaws Of Life had already been employed to free the driver. The seat was empty.
"Where's the driver?" Jose asked.
Dallas shook his head and tried to wrap his thoughts around what he was seeing. "Maybe if we canvas the grounds, we'll find the body."
Dallas clenched his jaw shut and stared at the bloody seat, still wet enough so that he knew the accident hadn't happened long ago, and whomever'd been driving was, more than likely, a DOA. Still, what had happened to the door? He looked around for a fire truck, but the ambulance was the only vehicle besides the battered car.
"What the hell happened?" Jose asked, his voice flavored with a light Spanish accent, and he followed his partner, who stooped to the passenger side, where he found that door was still operational, even though he had to tug a little harder than usual to open it. Frowning, Dallas started to reach for the glove box when he saw a woman's purse amid the blood. There was her wallet. Looked like he could forget searching for registration.
Dallas pulled a rubber glove--there was blood everywhere on that side--grabbed the wallet, and flipped it open, steeling himself against what he would find--whomever the driver had been, he or she was most likely dead; he simply couldn't fathom one surviving this kind of a wreck involving such substantial blood loss. Survival would've taken a miracle, and he didn't believe in those.
The driver's license featured a strawberry-blonde woman, and for just an instant, his vision glazed over, making him see someone else. The face was close, just a little longer. The hair was closer to auburn. And her smile was burned into his memory.
"Hey, Dallas. You okay?" Jose asked, prompting him back to the present.
When he looked at the picture again, this time he saw the real person, someone he recognized well enough: Carrie Williams. Of course, in a town this small, everybody knew everybody, so that was no stretch. Carrie had been a sweet girl everyone liked, and knowing that hers was the body he would be searching for made his gut tighten and his shoulders ache.
An image of Carrie as he'd last seen her flashed into his head, reminding him of one more thing that only added to the horror: she'd been in the last trimester of what had been a difficult pregnancy, so he'd be finding not one dead person but two.
"Who is she?" Jose asked, still looking at the car.
"Carrie Williams." Dallas snapped the wallet shut and lightly tossed it back on the passenger seat where no blood had soiled the fabric. "When I saw her last week, she was pregnant. Very pregnant." He gritted his teeth, more troubled than ever as he closed the passenger door.
"I can't believe she would have been able to get out of the car by herself; somebody had to have dragged her or something. Let's check for blood trails."
The two men walked around the car, and Jose pulled a pair of latex gloves from his pocket. As he scanned the ground for signs of blood,
he slipped his hands into the gloves.
"I don't see a damned thing," Jose said and shook his head. "You?"
"No." Dallas looked back at the car door barely clinging to the wreckage, and no matter how he tried to add things up, he couldn't. There should have been a body or signs of the first responders, whomever they had been, yet when he peered down, there were no tire tracks, no nothing, even though the ground was still moist from yesterday's torrential rain. Could Carrie have just walked away?
He looked back at the crumpled front end of the car, and he was pretty certain it had crushed her legs. She wouldn't have been walking anywhere. That would have taken a miracle and two hours to pry her from the wreckage, and two hours hadn't passed since the call came.
"You see any tire tracks or footprints?" Dallas started around the car, inspecting the ground more closely. Jose went the opposite direction, searching.
"No."
"Damn it. What happened?" A mosquito buzzed near Dallas's head, and he swatted at the air to drive the bug away.
"Maybe we should get in the ambulance and drive--see if somehow she made it out of the car alive and took off walking or something." Jose wouldn't meet his gaze, and that was one way Dallas knew his partner didn't believe her survival was possible, either and was just as troubled as he was by how weird this whole thing was turning out to be. Still, Jose couldn't think of a better idea so he pointed back to the ambulance.
"Okay. Radio Memorial and see if anyone else has brought her in." He stood for a moment longer, trying to piece together what had happened, but nothing made sense.
Jose was just getting off the radio when Dallas plunked into the driver's seat. "Any luck?"
"Nope."
Those words sent mixed feelings through Dallas as he started the vehicle. A belt squealed, and he made a mental note to get that checked out. Granted, his supervisor had been complaining about the budget and all, but it wasn't going to do the citizens of Kilbrough much good if the ambulance ended up on the side of the road when a 911 call came in.