Lucy's Changing Life Ch. 03

Author's Note:

This story is my attempt at an Alien Invasion and takeover piece. Whilst I like my fiction to be largely original, the story of Jess, Amy, Lucy, and Claire is inspired by a variety of fictions that have come before. The work of H.R. Giger is the most obvious, but by no means the only reference. No ownership of any specific franchise or property is intended or implied.

Jessica:

Jess spent a large amount of time sleeping, though the dreams were often full of dark and terrifying images, it was preferable to the sight of her mutating body and the screams of both herself and the other conversion subjects held in this Hive Complex. She and several other girls of more athletic build had been brought here once their town had finally been overrun and their resistance cell had lost its final assault.

Sleeping also meant she did not have to take in the sight of her humanity slowly being taken from her. When some significant alteration in her body had taken place since she was last conscious however, it resulted in a period of not insignificant mental distress, which would always bring one of the Alien-Human hybrids - she supposed she could call them equal parts "nurse" and "torturer" - running to her aid.

Sleep's final virtue was it also helped keep her mind from becoming distressed regarding the possible fate of her niece. She had gone to warn her group of street rats about the heavy ordnance from the assault on the Hive complex in which she had been captured, and she had not seen her since.

She had cried many tears over what might have happened to Claire, the closest thing to a daughter she had ever known. Claire had supposed to have gone to college two summers before, but the invasion had denied her that bright future. Instead she was now the de facto Mom to a group of orphaned kids that made their homes in the shattered remnants of the city's apartment blocks.

The one she had named "Antlers", due to the thick and elaborate protrusions that held her tentacles either side of her head, entered and approached her, carrying another one of the bloated fleshy bags of the morphogenic liquid. She shook her head as it was brandished, her bottom lip quivering. "No...please...no more!" she begged. Antlers stroked her face with slender, scaly fingers.

"Sssshhhh...your body is becoming so beautiful Jessica" she crooned as she allowed the sac of vile liquid to attach itself to the celling of the chamber, organic tendrils snaking up to secure and embed themselves into the organic flesh above. "Soon you feel the joy of being part of the Hive." Jess occasionally remembered to reason that Antlers must once have been human herself, which made her actions all the more hateful, that she would betray humans so readily in favour of her new species.

She looked down at the enormous mound of her belly as the sac grew a tendril and latched onto her navel. It pulsated nastily as it began to deliver its content into her bloodstream and she sobbed, reaching with one hand, half-twisted into a wet, glossy spindly black claw to stroke her abdomen, which seemed to help with the pain.

The next period of unconsciousness must have been longer than usual. Either that or they were increasing her doses of the stuff that was causing her transformation.

When she awoke next, Jess found she could no longer move with ease, she had trouble shifting her bulk in her chamber. Her vision was more acute but her jaw seemed to ache intensely. The mutagenic sac had been withdrawn and her belly was now an enormous, mottled grey-green mass, streaked with black veins. At its peak, her navel had caved in, replaced with a wet anus-like hole, which would occasionally hiss a fine spray of slippery fluid with a liquid, sucking sound.

She managed to roll her head to one side, to the small, reflective section of bulkhead that lined one strip of the wall, forming a makeshift mirror. The face that stared back at her was that of a monster. The last of her hair was gone - most of it had fallen out anyway - and it had been replaced by a shiny, domed oversized forehead, beneath which her eyes bulged, moved back over her temples, each one a deep green with a black slit for a pupil. Her mouth and nose had been reshaped into a sharp-toothed maw and between those teeth a thick, snake-like forked tongue flicked forwards.

Jess screamed at the sight of what she was mutating into, but the scream came out as a screech of inhuman rage.

The adrenalin only served to intensify the transformation as the flesh at back of her head split open and her cranium extended backwards, causing her to roll it on her neck in agonised disorientation. A mass of slithering tentacles spilled out from within, thick at their base and tapering to their endings, each of which discharged a dribbling, drooling slime. The remnants of her human flesh hung wetly like a collar around her neck and glossy green-black organic armoured skull, flapping in the slight breeze that came from the gill-like vents in her flesh, keeping her cool.

The scream of course brought Antlers running to her aid and when the hatch to her chamber snapped open the hybrid woman hissed in pleasure at the sight of the human girl who was rapidly turning into a Hive Queen. She checked her over, Jess now considerably larger than her nurse. "Soon you shall be placed in your nest Jessica, and you will be the mother to thousands of your children" the nurse crooned in her deformed ear.

The words were the sweetest promise that had ever been given she thought and her bloated body shuddered as she let out an exhilarated sigh of relief. It was at this point that she became cognisant of the fact that not only were they claiming her body, but also her mind. They did not intend to leave her in this body, with the torment of imprisoning her human consciousness within it. Rather, she knew now, that she had to give herself to them, to the hive.

It was a strangely comforting realisation, that she could stop resisting and let go, to let them in. Some part of her mutated brain railed at the thought of being responsible for the conversion of more humans into creatures like Antlers but it fought with the new, almost all-consuming need to feel them squirming with her belly. It was a battle the human part of her was all too weak to win however. She was tired, tired of fighting, tired of clinging to some hope that magically, she would be rescued, and either cured, or euthanised out of existence.

"Yessss...I am ready..." she replied, and immediately thereafter, almost as if given her permission, the orifice at the apex of her domed abdomen flowered open wetly, prompting a cry of both pain and arousal as the birthing pit formed. The flesh around it sagged inwards and the folds of its "mouth" began to pulsate and gasp, constantly seeking a new victim as worm-like tentacles reached out from its perimeter. "Pleeeeeeease!" she hissed. "Briiiiiing me my childrennn!", her voice having taken on a gurgling, rasping quality.

"Patience Jessica..." Antlers whispered to her. "You are nearly Queen, but you must be whole, so you can be the perfect Mother. You have much growing to do yet."

Antlers was of course correct, it in fact took her several more days to put on sufficient bulk to begin the next stage of her metamorphosis. They lowered her into her nest on the second day, as she was becoming too large to be contained in her chamber any longer. She felt at home, comforted by the surroundings of her new home, the only home she would ever know from now on. Her enormous womb felt so empty though, and she yearned for humans to fill it, to be Mother to, to gestate and bring into the wonder of the Hive. Her unbirthing pit rose and fell anxiously as she waited.

On the fifth day, she was, by her reckoning, somewhere in the order of 30 feet from her head to where her huge, clawed feet anchored her. Between her enormous, spindly legs, skinless, made up of exposed black, twisted muscle fibres and exoskeletal bone, the disaster of her vagina lay, four feet from top to bottom. A mass of grey-green flesh, covered in slime began to push out of the mouth of her alien sex.

The thing Jess had become shrieked her high-pitched birthing wail from her monstrous jaws. The boulder-like organic mound stretched her vile cunt, accompanied by a river of mucusy discharge until it fell from her heavily, one side of it connected completely seamlessly to her rubbery labia.

Antlers seemed overjoyed at the sight of the horrific mutation between her charge's legs. The birthed prolapse began to inflate, growing in size rapidly, veins becoming distinct upon its surface. "UGGGAAHHHH!" she grunted as this latest, beautiful change in her body, beautiful to her mind at any rate, took place "YESSSSSSS! OHHHH YESSSSSS!" she roared. Antlers assisted in manipulating the emerging cocoon sac until it began to shift of its own accord, growing tendrils and offshoots that raised it upwards to the ceiling, still growing and elongating in preparation for its first occupants.

Lucy:

As Lucy entered the suburb she had previously called home, all appeared normal. In other words, the birds were tweeting and chirping along the deserted streets as the sun descended behind the trees in the sleepy outskirts of Boston. Nothing out of the ordinary there, she thought as she slowed the car to a crawling pace where she could observe any obvious signs of trouble.

The major roads had been treacherous, car fires and roaming gangs as the breakdown of law and order continued. Once a region had been overrun by the invaders though, no further news came out of that area.

She didn't doubt that they would get her too in the end, but she intended to go back for her family and make it to as isolated a place as possible, for as long as was possible, Montana, or Alaska maybe, if she could make it that far. She no longer had any preconceptions that the human race would endure, or fight back, or live on following the invasion. She wasn't like her sister, she wasn't an idealist, she just wanted to protect her own.

She had lost her partner, Kate, early on in the resistance, when hopes had been high and before she had seen so many lost or taken. She couldn't bear the thought of losing anyone else. As she entered her own street she cut the engine and silently drew the car up to the front of the house.

She got out, leaving the door open in case she needed to make a quick exit, and tentatively entered, calling her daughter's name with her pistol drawn. No response. Wandering into the kitchen an empty milk bottle stood on the large oak table, a note trapped underneath it in Claire's handwriting.

"Mom, if you find this, I'm with Aunt Jessica, we're OK."

Relief washed over her, and she knocked the milk bottle over as she rushed to throw as many supplies in a canvas duffle bag as she could get her hands on. Her sister was a Sergeant in the resistance unit here. If Claire was going to be safe with anyone in this hellish world, it was with her.

Lucy raced back into the street and threw the duffle onto the back seat of the car. She was about to turn the key in the ignition when she heard the roar of engines from up ahead. The aliens didn't use combustion engines, so she knew it wasn't them, but it could be raiders.

When the army trucks rounded the bend in the tree-lined avenue, she belted out of the car and started waving her arms to try and flag them down. Several of the leading vehicles honked their horns for her to move, but she stood firm until the leading armoured vehicle stopped a few feet from running her down.

"Hey, you! Clear the road!" a burly looking officer shouted down at her.

"I can't - I'm looking for someone. She may be with your detachment. "

The officer chewed on his cigar and looked down at her with unshaven features. "You got a name for this someone?"

"My sister, Jessica Hurley" Lucy replied, shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun with one hand as she looked up.

"Sergeant Hurley? I'm sorry Miss, I truly am. She didn't make it during the last assault."

Lucy felt a stab of anguish. "She's dead then?"

"Dead, taken, it's all the same. Her squad was cut off when the Snakes took out the bridge." Snakes. That's what the military called the invaders, since they were reptilian, though given that they were bipedal, it was somewhat of a misnomer.

"And my daughter? Her name's Claire, about my height, long blonde hair?"

He shook his head. "I'm sorry Miss, she doesn't ring any bells. There are gangs of street rats that live in the cellars and the blocks East of the river. She may be with them". He plucked the stub of his cigar from his lips and gestured at her with it. "The remaining members of the unit have been ordered to return to headquarters" he told her curtly. "I advise you to do the same. I'm sorry about your sister, she was a good soldier. A good woman."

Lucy nodded. There was little enough hope to be found here, but if Jess's squad had been merely cut off rather than captured, there was still hope that they may be holed up somewhere without communications, waiting for rescue. And whilst there was a chance Claire was also alive, she couldn't leave.

"Thanks, but no thanks." She said, squinting up at him. He nodded and threw her a rifle which she caught deftly with her left hand, and a bandolier of bullets, with her right. The engines of what was left of this militia roared into life as they began to move away.

The river was not too far away, but it proved exactly as the Tank Commander had said; the bridge was a tangled mess of metal and concrete. She had hoped that even the wreckage would be passable to a single person with some courage, but the whole of the middle section was missing, the roadway now lying in huge slabs at awkward angles in the river.

"Damn" she hissed, having not wanted to consider the alternative. The City's tunnels had been a no-go area ever since the power had gone out, and there were rumours that they were crawling with the enemy and the various terrible creatures they had used to conquer the earth.

Slinging her rifle over her shoulder, she picked her way through the bombed-out buildings along the riverfront. Eventually nearing the wide boulevard that plunged into the mouth of the tunnel, she began to move through the long abandoned gridlocked cars, all looted, some burnt out, and down into the darkness.

She flicked on the light on the top of the rifle, figuring that if it made her easier to spot, it also ensured she could see to shoot straight as well. The tarmac beneath her feet was broken and blasted and in a few places, she had to make her way through makeshift barricades.

The deeper she went downwards, the hotter and more stifling the air became, the tunnel's air circulation system without power, and probably half its workings. The car wreckage eventually thinned out and her boots met black, brackish water, where the river was beginning to make its way slowly in, pumps and tunnel integrity suffering the same fate as fans.

An hour later she began to climb again, and her environment began to change, the concrete walls began to take on a more organic feel, wet and glistening with a substance that looked like green-black mud but which was sticky and cloying to the touch. Another ten minutes upwards climb and in a heart-stopping moment, she saw an object lying in the middle of what had been the road.

At first, she thought it was a human body, her anguished brain even worrying that this might be Jess, or Claire, and she quickened her step before skidding to a halt and something slippery covering the floor made her boots slip and she fell to the floor heavily.

She winced and got back to her feet, shaking alien filth from her arms and legs as she inspected the thing. It wasn't a body thankfully, it was some sort of oversized caterpillar's chrysalis, almost like a maggot had hardened on the outside and had burst open at one end.

She used the knife-end of her rifle to peel back one of the open flaps of the fleshy tube, and she hissed with distaste, stepping back as it leaked a viscous, grey slime. The end of the thing had been splayed open, like the skin of a banana. Something hatched from this, she thought, ominously, now wondering what kind of monstrosity might be crawling around down here with her.

When the invasion had begun, there had been all manner of variations of the Hive which had led the assault. Some were bipedal, some crawled on all fours. Others had grasshopper-like wings and had come to dominate the skies. She got up off her haunches and left it behind, now with even greater tripdation.

The heat now was stifling, and Lucy's T-shirt stuck uncomfortably to her body, with her rifle slung over her body, diagonally separating her breasts. The tunnel began to widen and open out before suddenly she was standing at the entrance to a high-vaulted hall. Every spare section of wall and ceiling was covered in more of the lozenge-shaped cocoons like the spent one she had encountered in the tunnels.

She gaped in disbelief at the sight, there must have been thousands, if not tens of thousands of them, and she reached a new level of desperation. If every one of these hatched, the resistance was effectively done for.

Every so often a high-pitched alien screech would sound in the distance. She was too busy taking in all of this to begin with to notice the fact that what she thought was a wall to her left was not a wall at all. It was breathing, with a rasping breath. This wasn't a storage area for these things she realised in horror. She had walked into the middle of a nest. She slowly walked forwards, turning around and circling to the right, and groaned in disgust and horror at what she saw.

Laid out within the main section of the chamber was the Hive Queen. Despite her horrific alien appearance, Lucy realised she had once been a human woman. Like the aliens she had seen on news reports before the agencies had ceased broadcasting, her skin was reptilian in nature, a sea green in colour, but unlike the average invader, her body had been converted into an organic factory for the mutation of her fellow humans.

The torso was thick, and sported a pair of sagging tits, covered in a shiny, slimy, hardened skin. Where long hair might once have flowed, her scalp extended into a mane of fleshy, dark coloured sectioned tentacles that hung round her gigantic shoulders, some of them leaking a translucent fluid that seemed to serve to keep her gigantic body lubricated.

Her long spindly arms ended in huge clawed hands, which looked too large for the wrists to support but which moved freely nonetheless. Occasionally they would clutch at the enormous mass of domed flesh that made up the lower half of her body, a large extended abdominal section which rose and fell with the creature's regular rasping breaths.

Within the corpulent disaster was a sunken pit, rimmed with questing tentacle flesh that slipped over itself and reached outwards in search of movement. Housed deeper within this was a wet, sucking mouth, which formed the entry to her womb chamber. The whole of her bulk must have been some thirty to forty feet in length at least Lucy judged.

At the centre of the pit, a naked, young woman's body was half submerged, the sucking orifice having just inched over her hips, inexorably drawing her downwards into the depths, her long blonde hair matted and sweaty. The look on her face was one of rapt pleasure, her hands massaging her own breasts and nipples, smearing them with the muck and filth of the pit's slick sides.

With horror, Lucy recognised her as her own daughter, Claire, and cried out in anguish at the sight, wanting to rush forward to rescue her from this fate, but realising it was probably already too late. She raised her hand to her mouth and let out a quiet sob. "Claire".