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Chapter Two

  Joe Cranston was scared but he would let no one see it. Where he came from men did not get scared. At least that was his personal impression and long held belief. Scared men were victims and he would never be one of those. Victims were losers and he was a winner. That was what he told himself every day, all day. He was a winner.

  What scared Joe Cranston was no ordinary threat upon his life or his livelihood. It took extraordinary to get Joe's attention and his current situation certainly qualified on that account. Joe's entire life had left the ordinary behind and entered a realm of extraordinary he had never believed existed before. It was greater than just being rich or famous, two of his favorite extraordinary fantasies. What Joe had gotten himself involved with was beyond the widest scope of ordinary. It was simply unbelievable. Except that he was living it.

  It began five weeks ago. It seemed like ages to him now. His former life all but forgotten since he embarked on this new direction. Each morning, as he shaved and looked at himself in the mirror, he could barely recognize the man he had become. Not different on the outside, but definitely a changed man inside.

  Gol had done that to him. When he had first met Gol, he believed the man was a normal guy, just a lot taller and stronger than average. A good friend to have in a scrape. And Gol had seemed like a friendly sort who was just looking for a way to get ahead in life like Joe.

  Then they had spent the night drinking over at Shady Sam's. Five weeks ago. That didn't seem possible. How had one night of drinking with a pal changed his life so much? But it had. And there was no going back. That was certain.

  Gol never drank beer. Too weak, was his explanation. He had convinced Joe that he didn't want to be weak, either. Joe rarely drank the hard stuff. He was mostly a local beer man. But that night he had let Gol show him a better way. Before the night was over, he had also let the giant of a man draw him into an intrigue of epic proportions that now swallowed up his former life like it never existed.

  Every day he thought about that night. Sometimes he was mad. Sometimes he was glad. Mostly he was still in awe of how fast a life changes. One decision. One choice. That's all it takes. That's all it took for him five weeks ago. Now he had to live with it.

  Gol had offered him a deal. It seemed impossible at first. No one had the power to give what Gol was offering. That was what attracted him to the giant's proposal. It was impossible. Joe was always on the lookout for a proposal that seemed impossible with even the slightest hint of being provable. That was how a good con man lived his life. Always in search of the next big thing.

  The offer had appeared to be genuine, if a bit impossible to comprehend the how it worked part. Gol came across as not only believable but also the real deal. He carried himself like he was the authority in everything. No one challenged him. No one Joe had ever met. No one cheated him. No one alive. Joe had heard the rumors. For the last five weeks he had thought of little else except Gol and his Alliance.

  Since then, the Alliance had consumed his life. His every waking hour was about carrying out the needs of the Alliance. He had sold out his former life to embrace the duties assigned to him by the Alliance.

  It was a simple deal. Do whatever we ask and we will give you whatever you ask.

  Simple. Joe had suggested that what he might ask for would be worth more than anything the Alliance could get from him. Gol assured Joe that nothing was more important or worth more than the tasks Joe would be carrying out for the Alliance. Joe believed him when he looked into those dark eyes and saw the fire burning there. Gol was one scary dude.

  Joe advised Gol he would require more than money for such a bargain. Gol said that whatever he wanted was available. Joe joked that he would want protection from certain individuals as he operated. Joe believed Gol would have no problem in the area of protection. Gol said protection was given to all who worked for him.

  Joe asked about the tasks he would be performing. Gol had told him that everything would be supplied and there was no chance of anyone getting in Joe's way while he worked for the Alliance. Joe liked that. Too often his deals went south because one party or another got in the way and turned his deals sour.

  Joe admitted he was not always law abiding in his businesses but wanted to know whether what he would be asked to do would break the law. Gol said that the only laws that got broken would be the laws of nature. When Joe asked how that could be, Gol laughed.

  Then they had started drinking heavily. Gol was pouring and Joe was drinking and the next thing he knew, Joe was shaking hands with that huge paw of Gol's. It happened that quick. Joe remembered Gol telling him that he would become the most desirable man in the room when he carried the product of the Alliance for delivery. Gol also promised Joe that women would become extremely attracted to him after he began working for them. Joe had been kind of on a losing streak with the ladies lately. Having women become attracted to him would be a nice change. He wasn't sure but he thought he had agreed to work for the Alliance because Gol offered to make him popular with the ladies. It embarrassed him to be that desperate and that easy.

  After that night he had not seen Gol for a couple days. It was Wednesday night when Gol showed up at his apartment. He did not remember telling Gol where he had lived, but there he was. Bigger than life standing at his door. Hell, where Gol was concerned, he was bigger than everything.

  Gol had come in and told him that they would start that Friday night. He had come to apprise Joe of the details of the Alliance business he had opted into. Gol had made him swear to keep everything confidential. Then he made Joe three promises. The first was that if Joe shared any of the Alliance business with anyone, the Alliance would know and that would terminate their contract. The second was a promise that the only way to terminate the contract with the Alliance was to die.

  The third promise was designed to make the first two palatable. If Joe did the bidding of the Alliance, no one would touch him and everything he did would succeed. The third promise is the only one that Joe actually considered. The first was an ordinary clause in most of his deals. Confidentiality. The second was a product of either an overactive imagination, which he did not believe Gol capable of, or a truly genuine acknowledgment of the only way out of their relationship. Joe was aware that some illegal businesses operated on such a level of secrecy that the only way out was to die or be killed by the bosses. Joe was not afraid of such a contract. In fact, he had always wanted to operate at that level and roam freely through those secretive circles. He had believed that he was entering into some arm of organized crime. He had thought that his career had finally taken a turn for the better.

  His thoughts had changed a lot since then.

  Gol explained about a different plane of existence. One more real than the one he currently lived in. Joe had merely listened. He allowed that Gol might be a little eccentric. Didn't matter to him. Long as the money was good.

  As Gol talked, Joe learned that the three most important things in life were blood, fluids, and spirit. Blood was easy to understand. Humans and most breathing things had blood. Fluids were the sexual carriers of the procreation energies inherent in living, breathing creatures. But spirit energy was an illusive concept for Joe. He understood what energy was, like electricity and human get up and go. But unlike blood and the fluids, he did not understand how the Alliance collected the spirit or its energies.

  Gol's explanation had taken him deep into the night of that Wednesday and well into the morning of Thursday. Little by little Joe had come to understand that his job was to meet young women and get them pregnant. He liked that job. Didn't fully understand it but liked it all the same.

  The problem was that before the impregnating he had to kill five people. Never one to back down from a challenge, Joe only gave slight consideration to the killing part. Until Gol told him who the targets were.

  Children.

  Joe had asked why children expecting some answer about sending a message to their families or something. Gol never went there.
Instead, he had explained the energy thing. The energy of a child is powerful and full of all the opportunity their young lives represent. Taking and absorbing that energy was crucial to the work of the Alliance. Five killings, sacrificed for the Alliance, would be necessary to initialize their procreation.

  Five children.

  Still, Joe had not been scared off. His mind kept going back to the fact that he was in if he did their bidding. He imagined his life was set from that moment on. It consumed him. It warped his view of the young lives required for the Alliance work. It also kept him from asking too many questions.

  So he had done it beginning that weekend, he had followed Gol's directions to the letter and driven the four hundred miles necessary to reach all the victims. Like a hit man for a nursery school, he had carried out the first part of the Alliance request with greater ease than he had thought himself capable of. That fact only made him more convinced of the idea that he was made for this business.

  Five children had died that weekend as he followed the plan Gol had laid out for him. Anonymous, silent, unseen. He had completed the operation in two days and was back in his own bed by Sunday night. Five families were devastated and torn apart but that was not his concern. He didn't even watch any of the news coverage on TV. This was not about being famous. This was about creating a secure life for himself. Him. If a few children had to die to make that happen, so be it. And no one was questioning him or mentioning his car being in the vicinity. He was free and clear. Gol had said he would be. Gol had kept his word.

  For Joe it was a simple initiation into an exclusive club. He was willing to make the sacrifice for his future. It was the next weekend when things had gotten strange. And strange for Joe was way out of the normal range.

  Gol had shown up at his apartment on Thursday night. He announced that they would now begin the second phase of the operation. Gol had chuckled in a mirthless way and asked Joe if he was ready to become catnip for the ladies. Joe was all for that. It meant he was in.

  Gol explained that in order to carry out the second phase of the Alliance plan he would have to make deliveries for the membership. Joe was eager to get started. Gol laughed and told him that the package he was delivering was unlike any package he had ever heard of before. Then he described the process whereby the Alliance would impregnate Joe and send him off to impregnate some unsuspecting woman.

  Joe was incredulous. He had to get pregnant? That was a foreign idea to him. Men pregnant? He had asked Gol if he was joking. Gol did not have a funny side. Gol assured him it was the way the Alliance operated and, Yes, it was out of the norm. He had reminded Joe that he had been told that Alliance business was different. Yes, Gol had not told him exactly how different but that was because no one outside the Alliance business could be made privy to the details of Alliance business. Then Gol had reminded Joe that there was still only one way out of the Alliance once he was in. Joe got the message.

  Then Joe had gotten the package for delivery. That had been degrading. If anyone had told him what he was going to have to do to get the package he might have opted for getting out instead of accepting the delivery. Gol had brought in one of his brothers, Ish. Ish was as tall and wide as Gol. Two giants in one city. Joe was impressed by the family genes the two must have shared. He was not impressed by the delivery method of the pregnancy.

  When Gol had told him to drop his pants and bend over, he had thought briefly about refusing. Looking at the two giants and thinking about how easily they could tear him apart, Joe had done as they commanded, gritting his teeth the whole way.

  It was bad enough that he had to be assaulted in such a manner but their huge size was obviously proportional. Joe knew that he would be a long time waiting to walk normal again after the delivery assault. And the pain of the necessary injection made him wonder if the women he had been with felt a similar discomfort whenever he had similarly used them.

  After the delivery had been made to him, he was warned that the seed inside him was powerful and would attract the first woman he encountered because he was not strong enough to control it. He was also warned that the seed would make him uncomfortable until it was planted in a receptive female where it could begin to grow properly. It could not properly grow inside a man. That was part of the process. Inside a man, the seed started to die. Just a little. But that little bit made it safe to implant in a woman.

  The power of the seed was based on the desire a woman had to be a mother. Some women may not have any desire in that area and the seed would hold no power over them. He was told to wait until a woman sought him out so that he would know that the seed had done its work. He was also told to wait twenty four hours before getting near a woman. Before that the seed would be too strong for the woman's system to handle. And, too strong for Joe to hold it back.

  Joe had stayed in bed that next Friday until time to go out at night. Gol's suggestion. Besides, the point of the injection hurt and his ego was even more inflamed. But come nightfall, he had done as he knew he would. He did not come this far to quit now. He drove to his favorite watering hole and waited at a table in the back. Women came in and left all night, most with other guys. Joe would have been happy to sleep with any of them. They were the usual good time, party girls he saw in there. None approached Joe. By the end of the night Joe was convinced that Gol had just given him a line so that Gol's brother Ish could assault him. He drove back home, alone, and went to bed believing he had to be the biggest chump on the planet, or in this dimension or plane or whatever Gol had called it.

  Saturday morning he had a job to do for a friend who owned a small business. When he got to the place, he immediately met the receptionist, Carol Bennings. The woman had been helpful to the point of asking him repeatedly if there was anything else she could do for him. By the end of the day, the two of them were joined at the hip. Carol had invited him home for dinner and he had accepted gratefully.

  Carol was a beautiful brunette with a shapely figure. She was at least two categories above the type of woman he usually attracted. Joe knew at that moment that the seed was working its magic or whatever. He could also feel a stirring in his belly that had nothing to do with his own manhood or that great dinner he shared with Carol. He had since come to recognize that the seed wanted out of his body as much as he wanted it out.

  He had shared Carol's bed that night at her insistence. She wanted him to come to her and she did not care that he was not going to use a condom. She just wanted him to take her. And he had. At the moment of transfer he had felt a huge pain in his own manhood as the seed made its way out of him and into the woman. She had felt the injection of the seed, too. Joe had watched as her eyes grew wide and then shuddered closed with the onset of a fantastic orgasm the seed created to mask its own arrival.

  The night had ended with Carol thanking him over and over for a fantastic time. Joe had never had that happen before. He liked the feeling of a woman thanking him for servicing her.

  The next three succeeding Thursday nights had brought Gol's other three brothers to his apartment with similar impregnations. Helen Norris, Iris Cunningham, and then Barbara Self all fell under his spell. All three had been similarly impregnated by the seed of the Alliance. Each of them had been so complimentary of Joe's performance that Joe was beginning to enjoy the time he spent with the ladies despite the awful inconvenience of the method to achieve the attraction and power of the seed.

  And now it was Thursday night again. Joe was beginning to wonder how many brothers Gol had and when they would get to the next phase of the Alliance plan. Part of him wondered what the next phase was. Gol alluded to there being a next phase, just not what it was. He wondered if it was as uncomfortable as this phase or maybe if it was more rewarding with the ladies somehow. He let his mind race forward and think about all the ways he could think to be rewarded by the ladies. The knock at his door brought him out of his thoughts and back to reality.

  It was Gol.

  “One last night of impregnation, Joe
.”

  Gol spoke in a deeply resonant voice that rumbled like thunder and rolled like a large ocean wave across the room. He stood two feet taller than Joe and had to stoop considerably to get in under the doorway. Once in the room, the eight foot ceilings were scraped as Gol walked to the living room.

  “Thank god,” Joe whispered, half under his breath.

  “What?” Gol asked and turned on Joe.

  “Nothing. I'm just glad to get through this phase. It's not...uh...exactly my favorite part of our association, thus far.”

  Gol chuckled at Joe's embarrassment.

  “Well, one last time and we'll move on with our plans.”

  “That's music to my ears.”

  “Thought it might be.” Gol chuckled again. It sounded more like someone trying to start a chain saw.

  “What brother is it tonight?”

  “No brother,” Gol stated. “Tonight it's me. Bend over, Joe.”