The Primal Connection (8 page)

Terry watched as he left, fighting tears of his own, wondering if his had just seen a page of his own life played out in living color. It was easy to figure out how he could end up his own tragic figure with nothing but time on his hands and painful memories to keep him company.

For a few seconds, he watched the man walk away, Charlie silent but as always looking for a crack in his host. He knew how much stress Terry had at any given moment and it amazed even him that he had never given any sign of it. That said, it was still a constant concern.

Once the man was out of earshot, Terry smiled crookedly. “Anything you wanna say or you just hangin’ out?”

Benin stepped out of the shadow of the tree he’d been behind. “When did you know I was here?”

“When I got here. You weren’t exactly inconspicuous.”

Benin decided to take a straight-line approach. “That from the training they gave you in the agency?”

Terry shook his head, laughing. “What agency is that?”

Benin rolled his tongue around in his cheek. “Yeah sure. No straight answers. Perfect form. You’re a textbook response with legs.”

Terry felt his temper flare but only for a second. “What do you want, Benin? To ask me shit we both know I won’t answer or hunting for another way to jam me up the next time?”

Benin threw up his hands. “Hey, truce! I’m just trying to figure out what it is you do. Even I haveta give you props on this one. But at the same time, you gotta admit, it looks kind of funny that you find this guy as soon as he shows up. I mean, it’s been, what, nearly a month since he killed the last girl. What the hell made you think he was going to come back?”

Something in Benin’s tone told Terry that there was an accusation in there that he didn’t mean the way it sounded but had its own venom nonetheless. This time, Terry didn’t pull back on his temper.

“If you got something to say, Benin, spit it out! But remember, we’re up here alone, so if it gets ugly, you don’t have those two gorillas you keep on a leash.”

Benin smiled. “How do you know I don’t?”

Terry’s grin was hard enough to cut diamonds. With a stare as steady as the North Star, he answered in a voice just as cold. “I know.”

Benin was as sure that he did, as he was that neither Simms nor Salazar was close enough to help if he needed them. He decided alienating Terry wasn’t the way to go.

“Okay, okay. We’re on the same side here. To tell the truth, we should be even more on the same side. I could pull some strings and—”

Terry cut him off, still agitated. “I gave up working for the government when…I got out of the army. You guys have too many rules for me and too many politicians running the show. I got no problem working
with
you guys but working
for
you is another thing altogether.”

Without another word, Terry turned and headed for his car. Benin wanted to say more but bit off the words. Everything was a process. There would be another time, that much he was sure of, and there was no reason to poison that time by driving a wedge between them even further.

As Terry slid into the car, he felt Charlie nipping at the corners of his mind. He ignored him. He wanted Benin and him to make nice, but Terry was fonder of the idea of cuddling up with a rattlesnake. He figured either way he was going to get bit on the ass.

Not to be ignored, Charlie pushed his way in.
“I believe that is what your people call offering an olive branch.”

Terry took a deep breath and prepared to cut loose a shrill whistle to drive Charlie back into the recesses of his mind. Instead, he let it out slowly, saying out loud, “Shut up, Charlie.”

It was a long drive back to Billings. Long and quiet. Terry said nothing, and Charlie didn’t want to push the issue. There was nothing new about this. After every case, Terry went into what he termed the winner’s blues. Happy as he could be he, nonetheless, felt depressed about all the things that he felt could have gone better. There was little enough to complain about, but it was a habit he had left over from the army. Since nothing was perfect, that meant there was always room for improvement. Charlie shuddered to think what would happen if he ever actually did everything right.

In Billings finally, Charlie felt brave enough to bring up their customary celebration. It was tricky bringing the subject up. Terry was every inch a modern man but some things he simply couldn’t handle. One of them was sharing his sex partners. Since Charlie was a part of his mind and able to feel everything Terry did, he enjoyed sex as well. What he found extremely pleasing was that in all the occupied he had experienced, Terry was, by far, the most gratifying. To say nothing of being the most intense.

For Terry, it was just the matter of not being able to let go and really get into it. The first time he had tried, it was fine until he realized he could feel Charlie’s…amazement at the strength of the way it felt. So much so that he had allowed too much through in their first try. Terry had lost interest after that for a long time.

Charlie had finally apologized enough and come up with a compromise that suited them both. Finding a hooker. The impersonal nature of that kept Terry from feeling too guilty about Charlie’s voyeurism, which worked out fine for Charlie.

For Terry, not so much. Like most, he longed for a relationship based on more than his ability to pay. And he wanted that relationship with a person he knew and loved. Only he couldn’t do that as long as Charlie was in his head. As a result of this, Terry had lost his shot at the girl he had been in love with since he was a kid.

He often wondered if that was part of the reason he and Charlie had had such a long break-in period. Terry tried not to blame Charlie, tried to look on the bright side about how much good they were doing. Terry was even able to rationalize that on some level, their sacrifice was helping two races, and that one day, when both races learned how to coexist and communicate without the need for occupation, the depth of that assistance would be noted and remembered.

Which was fine and dandy for the future, but it made for a damn poor present. Terry still carried Chandra’s picture in his wallet. Still talked to her, but he’d left things hanging for too long.

She had called him when he came home from Iraq. They made no commitment when he left, Terry not wanting her to be any more invested in him than she was in case he didn’t make it back. So the fact that she had been dating someone else wasn’t an issue for him.

What was an issue was that she had dated a couple of guys more for appearance than anything else. Like Terry, she was old school. She decided to wait and did, politely going out on dates occasionally but never looking for anything more serious than company. She hadn’t even expected Terry to be the same way. What she did was her choice. But when Terry got out and went to work at the CIA, she wavered. Her wait, she felt, had been long enough; while Terry, by now well aware of what his life had developed into, did nothing to retrieve what she thought they had. As a result, they had drifted apart quickly.

Even so, he had remained her friend. Over the five years since Terry got out of the CIA, she had married, had a son and divorced her husband. Unknown to her, when her husband had tried to win her back, failed and still refused to finalize the divorce, Terry had paid him a visit. The late-night kind that leaves scars. Chandra got the paperwork the next day.

Terry had figured it was the least he could do. Still, he didn’t want Chandra to know he had done it. He simply wanted her to be happy. And last he had heard, she was, having seemingly fallen for a widowed banker that had his own son about the same age as hers. Terry managed to find out through friends back home in San Francisco that it looked like she might make the walk down the aisle once more and this time could be for keeps.

Terry hoped it was. She deserved the best this world had to offer, and if this guy could give it to her, Terry wished both of them the best. It made him feel good to think of it that way.

Almost good enough to let him sleep some nights without seeing her face.

Charlie knew all of this. And he felt guilty about his part in the situation. So much so, he had tried and found a solution of sorts that, while it couldn’t help Terry’s dislike for him being an unseen partner in his sex acts, at least allowed him enough privacy to enjoy sex in the simplest and most primitive form.

Charlie discovered that he could, with a little concentration and a lot of practice, isolate himself in Terry’s mind. The two of them had worked out the particulars of this the first few times Terry had given in to his
urges
.

What was more amazing, though, was the discovery that if their partner of the moment was occupied, Charlie was able to communicate for the first time in years, with one of his kind. Oddly for Charlie, that was more desirable than sex.

Terry, at first, couldn’t understand. Later as he thought about it, though, it became clear that, much like Terry’s loss of Chandra Miller, Charlie had his needs as well. They were just simpler. He loved sex, but for him, it was fun just to talk to one of his own kind. It was easy for him to pass things off as normal, although the first question was invariably, “Where did you come from?” since they couldn’t detect him until Terry and the host were having sex. Sometimes, he would explain the whole thing, others he would just mark it off as Terry having a poor bioelectric field. Since the fact was that Terry’s field emanations were exceedingly poor, at least as long as Charlie was interacting with them and making them appear so, it wasn’t hard to palm off on them.

At the moment, though, Charlie had to present the idea to a sullen and isolated Terry. During the drive, he had been quiet to the point of rudeness during Charlie’s attempts to engage him in conversation. Finally unable to stand it any longer, he tried open shouting.

“Are we going to play the strong, silent type all the way back to San Francisco, or are we going to at least pretend to be civil?”

Terry pulled into a rest area and fumed for a second. He knew he was going to end up doing their
celebration
same as always. There was no getting around it, and to tell the truth, he enjoyed it just as much as Charlie. The trouble was he hated giving Charlie the green light to another of his voyeuristic pleasures. It always left him agitated and, worse, talkative. Extremely talkative.

And afterward, for at least a day, there was no separation of them at all. While Charlie could and would isolate himself from Terry when he felt the need, and Terry had learned to as well, more by desire than design, it did not work after a night of sex, which, thanks to Charlie’s internal machinations, could last all night if he found a hooker capable of being influenced by her occupant. Or if the occupant wanted to stay longer but couldn’t influence her directly, they could increase her sensitivity, making the act so pleasurable, Terry got several offers of fealty and, in one case, even marriage.

Then, it was like they were not just connected but merged as far as their minds went. Every thought, every feeling either of them had during that period was open to either. And Charlie’s were, by this time, increasingly erotic. And given his perfect digital memory, horrifically accurate.

This, though, wasn’t like any other time.

“You know, Charlie, the day we met, I thought we were gonna change the world. That was why I decided to join the CIA. I figured that with that kind of training and access to the hidden data the world kept off the grid, I…we could make a difference. And what did we get? First time we made a case, using your abilities, I got called on the carpet under suspicion of collusion because they couldn’t figure out how I made the connections. They figured I was a fucking double agent! That I was working against them! Agent Fuller kept pushing, trying to find out my secret. What the fuck was I going to tell him? You see, Fuller, I got this alien in my head that can contact others of his kind and pick up all kind of things, even read a computer chip manually. He can tell me when somebody is lying by reading their body language and electrical fields sometimes. I could go on, but what’s the point? How was I supposed to tell him that crazy bastard Kramer was an occupied as well and you were the one that told me where he was and I made up that crazy story to cover it?”

Terry let his anger blossom for a minute as he continued. “If it hadn’t been for him, Benin wouldn’t be the shit that he is today. Fuller told him there was something wrong with me, and from then on, he’s been on my ass. And that ain’t about to change anytime soon.”

Charlie could feel the rage bubbling just under the surface, trying to find a seam to burst or a weak spot to exploit. It was hard for him, especially knowing that he was the reason for all of this. If he hadn’t waited so long, if he hadn’t been so afraid of letting someone see even the small part that was visible, he might get a host that was more normal. At least, then, he could leave if or when he wanted. He had often wished he could get away from Terry, for Terry’s sake as well as his own.

Then, his pragmatic nature came to the fore. There was nothing either of them could do. Whatever the reason, they were trapped in this arrangement until further notice. And given Terry’s limited medical training and Charlie’s inability to talk to any others of his race except during the limited time they had, it looked hopeless, at least at the moment.

So, he said in a simple, almost-fatherly fashion, which probably did little to make Terry feel better,
“We seem to have been dealt a bad hand, but we endure. That is all we can do. If we do nothing with the gifts we have been given, neither of us will be happy, and that will be a catalyst to make us make each other even more angry with ourselves and our situation. And in that vein, let us remember that if we had not been here, the girl Tina Mays would very likely have been tortured and murdered by the occupant and his host. So, the truth of this is we did good and we deserve to enjoy it. You already gave away half your money to get the girl the help she needs. That act will make you a hero to a whole town for some time and to a family in perpetuity. And somewhere out there is a human that will one day meet that same girl and have children with her. An act that would not be possible but for us.”