The Deep Beneath by Natalie Wright

to stop. You can eat at the hospital,” Erika said.
    “They’re not going to let him eat there,” Ian said. “When I broke my nose, I sat in the ER for three hours and they wouldn’t even give me a sip of water in case they had to operate.”
    Erika weighed the options. She considered asking 9 for his opinion but decided against it. He would likely take the question as an opportunity to send them into another spiral of riddles. She opted instead to defer the decision to the one to whom the answer mattered most. “Jack, what do you think? Should we stop at the crossroads and get you food or plow through to the hospital?”
    Without hesitation, Jack said, “Stop.”
    “Are you sure?” Ian asked.
    “Yeah.” He rotated his shoulder, winced but did it again. “The shoulder is okay. Pretty much anyway. But I feel woozy in the head. Nothing some food won’t cure.”
    “There’s that twenty-four-hour truck stop place at the crossroads, Ian. I think we should stop there,” Erika said.
    “Okay. But I want to go back to the prior conversation. Jack, what did you mean when you said H.A.L.F.?” Ian asked.
    “It’s an acronym. Human-Alien Life Form. Am I right?” asked Jack.
    “You are correct,” H.A.L.F. 9 said.
    “Shut the … no freakin’ way,” said Ian.
    “I do not understand this word ‘freakin’. What does it mean?”
    “It’s … well, it means …”
    “It means he can’t believe what you said. You want us to believe that you’re part alien?” said Erika. Erika had treated Jack’s belief in UFOs and aliens the same as if he had believed in unicorns or fairies.
    “I do not want you to believe anything. You asked me a question. I gave you the answer,” said 9.
    H.A.L.F. 9 never looked at them as he spoke. He looked forward, his eyes trained on the road unfolding ahead of them.
    “Are you the product of an alien abduction or something? Like they took a human woman on their ship and had sex with her and made you?” Jack asked.
    “You watch too much television, Jack,” Ian said. “That’s not what you’re saying, is it?”
    “I am not the product of a sexual encounter between two mates as humans are. At least that is what I have been told. The genetic material from the egg of my mother was spliced with alien DNA. The egg was fertilized with human sperm, and the resulting embryo was implanted into another woman – a surrogate host.”
    H.A.L.F. 9 spoke as though alien DNA was a substance every fertility clinic had lying around. Why didn’t I think of that? But Erika kept her sarcasm to herself for once.
    “Okay, so where did they get alien DNA?” asked Jack.
    “I do not know the answer to that question. All I know of my origin is what Dr. Randall chose to tell me.”
    Questions swirled around Erika’s head. She wasn’t sure she could believe the story given by the … man? Boy? Alien? But she wanted answers, and 9 was the only one that could give them. She’d worry later about whether his answers were the truth.
    “That Commander Sturgis who came after you. Is she military?”
    “Commander Sturgis is technically a member of the air force. I am not an expert on the function and command of the United States government, but from my studies, I deduce that Commander Sturgis operates outside of what you may call regular channels.”
    “The secret government. I knew it,” said Jack.
    Erika and Ian had argued this topic with Jack more than once but had never been able to persuade Jack away from his belief that there was a secret government within the government that controlled things. Jack wasn’t a fanatic. It was more like something he just accepted to be true. As they drove in a car with a person who claimed to be an alien-human hybrid, Erika wondered if Jack had been right after all.
    “Calm down, Mr. Government Conspiracy,” said Ian. “No offense, H.A.L.F. 9 is it? But we don’t know you. We don’t know a thing about this guy, Jack. He may be a wacko who escaped from a psych