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The worst thing about Delilah these days, Casey thinks as drops of blood chase each other down his face, (the same thing he always thinks when his face is about to lift away from his skull with scalpel-like precision; or when thread-thin tentacles jab into his ear to snatch away his thoughts like darting zooplankton; or arms charged with an electric eel-like current reach out to embrace him), is that she’s still beautiful.
If Casey had been lucky enough to live through a situation like this vicariously—instead of actually—he would’ve assumed that the worst part would be that Delilah was still so… Delilah under all the new genes two separate species of aquatic alien had co-modified her with.
Well, as Mr. Connor used to say: You know what happens when you assume things. It makes an ASS out of U and ME.
One of the few silver linings about an impending alien takeover of the planet is that Dad’s too dead (Spoiler Alert: Casey cut his head off with Zeke’s favorite machete) to impart his special douchebag wisdom every time Casey accidentally-on-purpose forgets to take out the trash or otherwise makes the fatal mistake of looking like he’s enjoying himself. If he doesn’t feel like it, he doesn’t ever have to take the trash out again. Unless that’s a euphemism for blowing up corporate buildings full of aliens.
So that’s another silver lining. That, and he doesn’t need to keep a porn stash under the bed anymore. His life is a porno. The kind that spoofs a sci-fi blockbuster with a lame pun in the title, but still a porno. He tries to think of what that title might be, but there’s a tugging sensation at his jawline and hairline and he’s too distracted by the fact that this is gonna be one of those times when Delilah 2.0 removes his face and leaves it for Zeke to find.
The new and improved Delilah is so much more spiteful when she doesn’t get her way than the original. Especially now that Zeke’s found a way to prevent him and Casey from being spliced-and-diced.
Not to mention the tentacles. Don’t forget about the tentacles, he thinks, hysteria bubbling like giddy carbonation in his veins. Something like a cross between a laugh and a scream wrenches from his throat, and she begins to take him apart.
Tentacles, tentacles, he chants silently to his last spark of consciousness. Remember this. Talk to Zeke. Remem—
*
The sound of the bell yanks Casey awake, out of the clutches of the monster movie-version of Delilah. His feet kick out the way you do when he gets that falling-off-a-cliff sensation in dreams. He jerks his head up from his desk in Biology and gasps as if he’d narrowly escaped drowning. Hands dragging all over his face.
Zeke’s staring at him like he’s an interesting bomb he's going to have to defuse. Furlong just rolls his eyes and shrugs, which for some reason makes Casey shudder.
Or maybe what’s creeping him out is the image of Delilah that’s burned into his brain. Her facial features sharpened and stretched out in exaggerated angles ending in needlelike spines, bones and limbs elongated. Her brown skin taking on a shifting, shimmering golden-blue mimicking the movement of sunlight on water.
The way she was beautiful even with tentacles.
Even when she was taking him apart.
*
Casey still hangs on to all of his science fiction novels. The ones Stokely recommended and the ones he discovered on his own. Even the ones that haven’t proved useful from a warfare standpoint. He writes notes in the margins and then adds them to one of his old three subject notebooks when he’s done reading. Then he rotates the books he’s already read or re-read back into one of their storage places or cabins to make way for new ones that he leaves piled in the backseat of the car.
Zeke’s always giving him shit about it. Always lecturing about how they need to focus on science science, not science fiction. ‘Cause he’s all about the practical now. Microscopes and test tubes. Extra pairs of underwear and boxes of bullets. Machetes and paper cutter blades that can double as machetes when properly motivated.
Zeke’s full of shit. They both know he just doesn’t want to think about Stokely. He’s not trying to erase her existence from his mind, so much as he’s trying to erase her current state of existence from his mind. Zeke still blames himself, even though her last words as herself were: Go find Casey.
Not that Casey’s going to bring that up now, when there’s nothing they can do. Casey still blames himself.
“Oh yeah?” Casey will smirk at him instead. Say something like, “What’s practical about setting shit on fire and jerking off?”
Zeke stares him down, daring him to look away. But Casey never looks away. Not when it’s important. Zeke rewards him with a maniac’s smile. “It keeps me sane, Case.”
“Can’t argue with that,” he’ll say. Because he can’t.
That’s usually how that conversation ends. They sit there, in Zeke’s muscle car, or one of their safe houses, or a rundown motel room, quiet and grim, which they’re used to, but it’s not as depressing as one would think.
Except this time he really needs Zeke to understand, so he says, “They help me see things clearly. Teach me to think in new ways. The more mindbending, the more full of just plain weird shit, the more—” Casey glances over. Zeke’s staring right back. “The more hope I have. And people keep writing them. And publishing them. And buying them. There’s always more new ideas—possibilities—solutions, even—that I hadn’t thought of before.”
“G.K. Chesterton.”
“What?”
“Author. It’s like what G.K. Chesterton said: ‘Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.’ I guess that could apply to science fiction, too. The aliens functioning as our dragons, in this case.”
Casey pulls out his notebook just to be annoying. “G.K. Chesterton… How do you spell that?”
Zeke throws his long arm towards the passenger seat and grabs Casey by the back of his neck. He gently pushes Casey’s face into the notebook to stifle his laughter. “Blow me, loser.”
“You wish,” Casey huffs out, making the paper damp with his breath.
“You and both know I don’t *have* to wish, Case,” Zeke says with a smug smile, his eyes lighting up even more when Casey flips him off.
*
Zeke watches Casey being tortured on a tv screen the aliens were thoughtful enough to provide after they strapped Zeke down to one of their gene-integration tables. The same thought always occurs to him whenever he fails to stop shit like this from happening.
How two years ago (or four, or six, depending on what counts as two years ago, depending on whether re-remembering events that no longer happened exactly the way you kind of remember them happening means they still occurred in some kind of ultimate truth, existential way; he supposes that whatever leaves a mark on your soul, psyche, essence or whatever has to count for something), he would always make note of the alien quality of Casey’s enormous, bluer than blue eyes. If Zeke had it in him to sneer instead of scream at this moment, he would do so at his slightly younger, infinitely more ignorant self.
These days, he can’t escape the utterly human quality of Casey’s haunting gaze. It follows him in his dreams, the good ones, the bad ones, and the ones he’s not sure are dreams at all.
Whenever Casey looks at him, Zeke feels the combined mass and fate of blue planets burning themselves into his brain.
*
There are a lot of things that annoy Zeke about being invaded not once, but twice (even if he doesn’t always remember it) by two separate alien species who then form an alliance, combining innate mind-control abilities and parasitic biology of the first invaders with the super-advanced genetics and quantum physics of the second to re-design humanity for an ET version of their own Brave New World. Near the top of the list is being forced to quit smoking.
It’s all the goddamn running. It wasn’t survival that motivated Zeke. It was fucking Casey outrunning him after his shitty lungs couldn’t keep up with the pace his long legs made. That little fucker should’ve tried out for the track team freshman year and bought himself some popularity points and maybe a break from the flagpole for his balls.
Out of desperation, and feeling like the biggest nerd (especially with Casey cackling in his ear about how even he knows magic is for dorks, milking this one chance to be cooler than Zeke for all its worth), Zeke turned to sleight-of-hand tricks to keep his hands busy (that, and lighting things on fire with his otherwise unused Zippo—he’s a real pyromaniac freak now. Thank you, Casey.)—
—and sucking on Casey’s tongue and nipples and dick and neck and toes (turns out Casey’s feet are as feral-sensitive as an animal’s. It’s a real scream to watch Casey scream—and curse and moan and beg and threaten to pee on him—whenever he does it) to keep his mouth busy. (No really. Thank you, Case.
Shut the fuck up, Zeke. Or you can blow yourself in a minute.)
Casey’s become a firebug, too, of course. There’s a certain appeal in adopting fire as their element of choice, when the world is under attack from two separate species of aquatic exterrestrial life. They’ve developed a real taste for pyromania. Discovered the joy of setting shit on fire, or, even better, blowing shit up. Shit like alien headquarters and Puppet Master aliens and Gene-Splicer aliens and human traitors who sold out all theirs friends and family.
The same way Zeke’s been picking up Casey’s SF novel habit (which Casey picked up from Stokely), and Casey’s deft hands and quick eyes have recently started learning parlor tricks, too (Like shoving his skinny little artist’s fingers up Zeke’s hole when he’s distracted by Casey putting his mouth on his dick).
They pass on habits and newfound obsessions as if they were STDs. Hell, maybe they are. They never know these days.
It’s all Casey’s fault.
That’s what Zeke tells himself whenever he’s dragging his teeth over Casey’s boney (silky smooth) hip.
*
Aliens. Jesus Christ. Casey’s on something. At least that’s what Zeke tries to tell himself. But he knows that’s not true. He checked the little geek's pupils.
“No—listen to me, asshole!” He’s shoving Zeke into the lockers, catching him off guard with a surprise burst of strength and aggression. “Something’s going on with the faculty members. And don’t tell me you can’t feel it. I know you can. I’ve seen you staring at Furlong and the Coach.”
*
The thing about him and Casey, they’d always had this weird thing between them. They’d always had a kind of pseudo-blink-and-you’ll-miss-it alliance in high school when no one was paying attention.
The real difference between him and Casey is that Zeke knows how to pretend to not be a freak. As long as he keeps that chokehold on his temper, people never suspect who Zeke really is.
Casey doesn’t know the first thing about self-control or camouflaging yourself out of self-defense.
Except the joke’s on everyone. Casey’s true camouflage is the timid little nobody he pretends to be, Zeke thinks idly, as he turns the corner into the almost-deserted locker hallway just in time to catch Casey turn the tables and beat the shit out of Gabe with a textbook. Casey’s so good at hiding he’s even hidden his true self from himself.
Casey looks up at Zeke with the nose blood-smeared Physics textbook in his hands and back again, mouth open, eyes bugging out like a cartoon, astonished, as if to say, I can't believe I just did that. How did you know I had it in me to do that?
Zeke just looks back at him. I know you, fucker, the lack of expression on his face says.
They both know he’s the only one who does.
*
Thanks to the most recent break-in to one of the enemy’s labs, Zeke and Casey have a new advantage. They shouldn’t turn into mermen or squid people, but they’ll be a little harder to catch and overwhelm with force. They might not have to honor their suicide pact this time.
It’s like Zeke’s getting a chance to play with the chemistry set his mother never got him when he was a kid.
Except the chemistry set is human DNA. Zeke’s and Casey’s, specifically.
Zeke smirks to himself as he spins on his stool away from a microscope-covered desk to one covered beakers and test tubes. Look at me now, Ms. Burke, he thinks. Livin’ up to my potential.
All it took was the end of the world as we know it.
*
Stan’s dead and Stokely’s worse.
What happens when the personality is strong enough to fight the mind-control that serves as an anesthetic, but the body is helpless against the invasion of nanobot-powered new material isn’t a sight that goes away when you close your eyes. So Zeke holds Casey in the safe house while he screams in rage. He holds him through the biting, clawing, head-butting, kicking. He holds on until Casey must feel like his ribs are going to break.
It must be the right thing to do because he calms down eventually. Zeke sinks his teeth into his shoulder, then his neck, when he starts to struggle again. It’s a shuddery kind of struggle, though.
You’d have to rip his arms off his torso to get him to let go. (He took his eyes off Casey once—FUCKING WORMHOLES—for one second to see how much gas was in the car—and lost him for three months—THREE MONTHS—before Casey, with nothing worse than a split lip, a sprained ankle, and half his body slimed in alien gore, came smirking through one of those mini wormholes that the new, more advanced aliens cause with their ships like some kind of intergalactic snail trail. The ones they claim aren’t wormholes. The ones that sometimes reset events.
Casey had just enough time to utter the words, Well, that fucking sucked, before Zeke recovered from the shock, decked him with a punch that landed him flat on his ass, and then held him like he was a baby.
Not his proudest moment.
Casey lets it slide, mostly, except for the times when he’ll say, hey, remember that time you cried like a little bitch and held me like I was a baby when you thought you were never going to see me again, whenever Zeke’s intentionally getting on his nerves just to pass the time and Casey’s feeling particularly nasty.
Which pisses Zeke off so much that he does something like what he’s doing right now, which is jerking up the front of Casey’s shirt and raking his nails down his stomach. Casey gasps, and clearly pissed off about being turned on, he grabs the back of Zeke’s neck. He digs his fingers in and puts his teeth in Zeke’s throat.
And then they’re humping each other against the car next to a gas pump, and when the asshole in the Jesus-stickered Ford pickup tries to kick their ass, Casey pulls the gun out of the back of Zeke's jeans with one hand and aims it right at the motherfucker’s stupid mouth and tells him to shut the fuck up and mind his own fucking business, all while blindly grabbing Zeke through his jeans with the other hand. Which makes Zeke shoot in his jeans right as the guy dives back into his truck and tears out of the gas station, tires screeching away.
They hustle back into the car and Zeke floors it before the cops come, because even with aliens cautiously mind-raping one section of the population at a time, most of America still works the same.
Casey rolls his eyes and says, “Aliens are trying to take over the world, but god forbid there be queers.” They meet each other’s eyes and snicker like lunatics.
Casey’s unbearably smug for the next two weeks, until Zeke gets him back by accidentally almost being tortured to death and jumping out of some bushes, gasping, "Surprise, asshole!" just to be a dick, even though his tentacle-strangled throat is killing him. He passes out two seconds later and they're lucky it was near the car and Casey didn't have to drag his ass that far.
*
Maybe it’s fucked up that this trainwreck reality has become brings out the best in them, makes them both shine like two newborn twin stars.
Zeke’s bored indifference has burned away. He burns twice as bright now that he doesn’t have to feign a civilized appearance or maintain high school delinquent cred.
Casey has finally shrugged off all sense of insecurity (there’s no fucking time for shyness or self-doubt anymore—not when things are trying to mind-rape you into submission before they play with your body like Ken and Barbie dolls.
They’ve become half-feral. Like two stray dogs that snap at each other and fuck and lick each other’s wounds almost all in the same breath. When Casey shares this potentially nerdy thought, Zeke whispers in his ear as he strips Casey just-this-side-of-violent in another stolen moment. “We’re the gods of this world, Casey. Not them.”
It’s world domination for a good cause. Otherwise the evil freaks from outerspace will inherit the earth, “rather than the Earthling freaks,” Zeke adds, nipping his ear playfully.
*
Casey freaks out by the hotel pool when he sees ripples playing on Zeke’s skin, screaming a gut-wrenching “No!” until he hears Zeke’s voice saying, “Easy, easy. We fell asleep by the pool, remember?”
“Shit,” Casey breathes out, sagging forward. He buries his head in his hands. What’s possible in reality and daydreams and nightmares have become almost interchangeable. It’s hard to keep everything from blurring together. It’s hard to keep everything straight.
“We can still fight. And at least if we go out, we go out swinging,” Zeke says.
“And we make them feel it,” Casey spits out, before crawling on hands and knees towards Zeke to attack his mouth with a savage kiss.
Zeke pulls him against his chest and swears, “That too.”
*
Zeke never says, I love you.
Except in the way he takes a machete to giant tentacles and burns Casey with his slanted gaze—as if he’s only leaving room enough for skinny shit pansy freak Casey behind those crazy-intense dark eyes; in the way he punches holes in walls when they have to split up; in the way he quotes dead philosophers and Shakespeare while he makes Casey come, setting teeth in his throat, tender-vicious; in the way he says Casey’s name sometimes, two syllables that crack apart, like saying them makes him crack in half.
Casey’s self-aware enough to know he’s the kind of asshole where everything shows in his giant bug eyes, and that Zeke sees it all. But Casey sees things, too. Like the fact that Zeke’s not always as confident and emotionally bulletproof as he acts. Even during the times when they're stuck in high school again, and haven't figured out the "again" part yet, they develop (resurrect) an easy-going viciousness and trade fascinated-despite-themselves glances in empty hallways, each still seeing that familiar razor-sharp something of themselves in the other.