Chapter 5

When Danny first awakened, early the next morning, he was aware that his mind had somehow been reorganized. It was as if he'd become more intelligent again, like all his thoughts and memories were once again synchronized. His first thought, after realizing this, was that Caleb had been busy working on him as he slept.

His second thought was an appreciation for what Caleb's work had provided for him. He felt sharper, more energetic mentally than he'd recently been. It was as if his brain had been given a thorough cleaning. Everything was as it should be, and his thoughts now flowed smoothly once again.

Over his long boxing career, Danny had noticed that some of his thinking and ability to talk to other people had been degraded from the punishment he'd received to his head. When the alien had first come to him, Danny had noticed the improvement in concentration, speech, and his ability to communicate with people.

In the six months that Caleb had been gone, Danny had been aware, at least subconsciously, that his skills had once again started to diminish. He was still a better fighter than he'd been, before Caleb, but, in his last fight, he'd had to absorb some punishment himself before he'd managed to defeat his opponent. His thinking had seemed slower, more labored to him. He now realized that it took good mental skills as well as the more obvious physical talents in order to be a successful fighter. The mind told the body what to do.

"You messed with my head again while I was sleeping."

"If you are trying to thank me, you are doing so in a strange way. All I did was to return your thoughts and memories to where they were before I left. I also repaired the damage to your brain that you'd suffered in my absence."

"I didn't get hit that much. Maybe in my last fight I got popped a few times, but I've been hit a lot harder than that before. I felt just fine when I went to sleep last night. Don't pretend you do these things just to help me."

Caleb didn't see any advantage to continuing on in the vein they had been taking. He had questions he needed answered, and he couldn't get any of the answers he wanted while he remained invested in Danny's body.

Before he'd left the last time, to return to the KAL, Caleb had modified Danny's life force so that it could utilize the same energy it did while Caleb was present and able to provide a substitute energy to power Danny's biological requirements. He had made a slight miscalculation in the amount of energy necessary to sustain all of Danny's life functions. When he had first returned, he was surprised to find Danny still alive. According to the corrected calculations he had made, Danny should have burnt up all the remaining energy, sometime early in the fourth month after Caleb had left.

Instead of this being the case, upon Caleb's arrival, Danny still had sufficient energy to last him for as much as another two months. Caleb needed to find out the reason for this, and couldn't do so while he was resident in Danny's body. He also wanted to find out if Danny was unique in being able to create this new energy of his.

In addition to all the other reasons for his decision to reside in a different biological host, Caleb was fearful of the increasing strength, and the degree of Danny's control over these shields he was erecting. He believed there was far less chance of his needing to extinguish Danny's life force in the event his own continued existence was threatened again, if he were invested in a separate living entity.

He wouldn't make the same mistakes with any new corpse he might invest. This time he'd make sure that every possible life energy had been fully extinguished prior to his taking it over. The only real problem he foresaw in all this was with how he was going to be able to maintain any semblance of control over Danny, once he had divested himself from Danny's body.

"I'd still need that energy, right?"

Hearing Danny question him like that, as if he had been able to follow all of Caleb's recent thoughts, struck terror into all the alien's synchronized thought paths. He came very close to overloading his system.

"What do you mean?" Caleb tried to overcome the stark terror he felt after hearing the question. He hoped that Danny had been referring to something of his own, not inquiring about Caleb's own dilemma.

"You want to make yourself safe from me being upset with you. I can understand that. I want to be free of you too, but not so free that I get myself dead again. We both need each other. If you're going to be doing any experimenting, I'd rather you did it on someone besides me. We both want the same thing, so I think we can make some kind of a deal."

"How long have you been able to listen in on my thoughts?"

"I don't know. I think I could always do it a little, right from the beginning. Now though, it's like you're speaking right to me. When you want to do it, and when you might not want to. It sounds the same to me, and it's annoying too. You never stop thinking."

"You agree with me that it might be preferable if I start inhabiting another?"

"Only as long as you doing that doesn't have any effect on that other deal we made. I'm still going to get my fifty two years, and you'll keep me sharp, so that I can keep on fighting. Fighting and winning."

"I will consider what you are offering. If I were to do this, you would still need the energy you get from me in order to remain alive. Nothing has changed to obviate the necessity for this. Do you have any ideas about the kind of human I should look for to invest myself in?"

"Maybe a boxing trainer or a good manager. Better if it were a trainer who can also act as my cut man. Someone it would seem natural for me to be hanging out with all the time. Either that, or else a good looking young chick. People wouldn't think anything was strange about me having a girlfriend."

It was later that morning before the answer to both their problems appeared on the television set in Danny's suite at the casino. A famous young female actress had collapsed the previous evening at one of the night clubs in Las Vegas, apparently from some kind of a drug overdose. She was currently in the hospital, on life support. Her divorced parents were fighting over whether or not to order the life support removed. Reports were being made asserting that the twenty one year old girl had ceased all brain function, due to the severity of her overdose. One parent was the beneficiary of a five million dollar insurance policy taken out on the actress's life.

The other parent, her father, was refusing to allow the life support to be removed. He was claiming that his ex wife was motivated by her greed at receiving the insurance proceeds. He admitted that his daughter would probably never recover, but said he couldn't bear the thought of letting his beautiful little girl go.

Just after noon, the newscasters started reporting that the girl's parents were participating in a closed conference with their respective legal advisor's. It was being reported that they were discussing how an amicable resolution to their dilemma might be found. One reporter said that he thought some kind of deal between the parents was being brokered.

"Could you get down there before they pull the plug on that girl? She'd be perfect as my girlfriend. Since she's already brain dead, you wouldn't have to worry about getting any of the same kinds of problems with her that you've had with me."

"You are forgetting the problems I would have to face in light of her fame and notoriety."

"Her face would open a lot of doors for me. With her at all my fights, it wouldn't take very long for me to get my shot at the title. Do this one thing for me, and I promise I'll work with you all I can to help you understand that new energy thing you've been so worried about."

"I'll hold you to this promise, Danny. Let's go before they end up declaring this girl dead."

It took fifteen minutes by cab to get over to the hospital where Lindsey was being treated. Once there, they found hundreds of curious people standing vigil outside the hospital. It was a circus atmosphere. Danny felt Caleb leaving him, and knew he'd have to keep standing there, just outside the entrance until Caleb either reappeared, or sent him some signal to tell him to leave.

Danny missed the hurriedly called press conference forty minutes after Caleb departed from him. While still in an apparent coma, Lindsey's brain wave activity had suddenly resumed. All her other physical indicators were being monitored. Doctors were unable to explain why her brain wave signals had gone flat for so many hours, and then suddenly resumed again. Speculation among the various television pundits was that something had gone wrong with the monitoring equipment. Lawsuits were already being prepared.

At six that afternoon, Lindsey regained consciousness. The first words out of her mouth were to request the whereabouts of Danny Sanders. She adamantly refused to answer any questions until after she was reunited with her boyfriend. By six thirty, some member of the hospital's staff was out by the front entrance calling Danny's name. Word had finally spread down to the assembled crowd that Lindsey was apparently going to recover.

Within minutes of word of this change in her condition, mostly coming from people in the crowd who had cell phones and internet access, the crowd began rapidly dispersing. By the time the hospital employee came to the front entrance, shouting out Danny's name, there were fewer than twenty people maintaining their vigil outside the hospital entrance. Danny walked up to the man who was shouting and identified himself.

"Lindsey's regained consciousness. She wants to see you. Will you please come with me?"

Danny nodded, and then followed the man inside the hospital. He was led to a small elevator and then taken up to the third floor. After walking down a long corridor, he was ushered into a well lit hospital room. Against the far wall he saw Lindsey in a hospital bed. The mattress had been raised up so that she was sitting almost upright.

The first thing Danny noticed was that her facial color seemed off, a little too pasty looking, and her hair was tousled and looked dirty to him. She didn't look much like she'd looked in the movies he'd seen her in, or even the TV news reports when she'd been arrested, or when the paparazzi had taken pictures of her outside the various night clubs. She had a high forehead too. On the plus side, he could see that she still had those great tits, and he thought she'd look a lot better after a few good nights of sleep, some healthy food, and a nice long shower or two.

"Danny, can you help me get out of here? They're saying they want to keep me here for another few days."

"Who's saying this? It better not be the same people that were going around telling those TV people that you were brain dead. We're going to be suing their asses off for telling those people that. Where are your parents?"

"I told the hospital not to let them in here. Did you hear what they were going to do?"

"I heard. I came as soon as I could, but they wouldn't let me in to see you."

Danny turned to the three doctors and two nurses who were in the room with Lindsey and him. They looked nervous.

"Do you have any idea of the damage you've caused by telling people that Lindsey was brain dead? Suppose her mother had been able to get you to terminate her life support, and then Lindsey had woken up like she did? We're getting out of here, right now, before you incompetent ass holes figure out any new ways to kill her off. If you try to stop us, you'll all end up defending yourselves against enough malpractice lawsuits to ruin you, financially. Where are her things?"

When they nodded to the clothes closet, Danny went over there and saw this tiny black dress. There were puke stains on it, and it stunk to high heaven. He knew he didn't want to be around anyone wearing something like that. The smell almost made him sick, and he was standing four feet away from it.

"Where's her under things, and her purse?"

"She didn't have anything on under her dress, and she didn't have any purse that we saw when she was brought here by ambulance." The older doctor was telling Danny this. Lindsey was wearing one of those hospital gowns, the kind that was tied by strings in the back. "I think her mother brought a suitcase with some of her things in it, but I don't know where it is now. She might still have it with her. She's been taken to a private waiting room on the floor beneath this one. Should I call down there to find out?"

"Go ahead and call her. Tell her she can come up to visit for five minutes, but only if she brings that suitcase with Lindsey's things."

Five minutes later, Lindsey's mom arrived, carrying a blue overnight bag. She spent the next ten minutes making cooing noises over Lindsey, getting nothing at all back from her daughter. While she was there, Lindsey got up out of bed and started rummaging through the bag, looking at what her mother had brought for her. Danny had one of the nurses call out for a taxi, and direct it around to a seldom used side entrance.

Twenty minutes later, Lindsey and Danny left the hospital together, but not before they made her sign a bunch of paperwork. Danny didn't bother reading any of it, but he'd have been willing to bet it released the hospital and staff from any legal liability concerning her treatment while a patient there.

Lindsey wore dark sunglasses, and had some kind of a skiing cap over her hair. The taxi driver didn't seem to recognize her, and Danny had him drop them both off at the corner of Las Vegas Blvd and Flamingo Road. The driver said he couldn't do that, but a twenty dollar tip soon changed his mind. The pair walked up to the overpass crossway on the Caesar's Palace side of the street and walked into the Bellagio from there. Five minutes later, and they were safely inside Danny's suite.

Lindsey got on the bed and, not three seconds later, Caleb was pushing himself back inside Danny's mind.

"That went well, Danny. I need to get right back to the corpse, but I needed to let you know it was going to be another day or so before I've gotten her completely stabilized. You have enough energy so that this will not be a problem for you."

"When will she be strong enough for me to fuck her?" Danny felt something like a shudder taking place inside his head. A second after that, he was gone. He hadn't answered Danny's question before he left. Danny noticed Lindsey's eyes opening soon after, and then she stood up and walked into the bathroom. Less than a minute passed before Danny heard the toilet flushing, and then, the shower starting up. Twenty minutes later, she came out, her hair was wrapped in a smaller towel, and she had a bigger towel wrapped around her, covering up all the good parts.

"Danny, you can't do what you said earlier. This is still me. I'm using her body, but I'm still Caleb of the KAL. I have no interest in having sex with you."

"I don't want that either, Caleb. Can you fix it so you come over here for awhile, and then we'll both fuck her?"

"I don't want to risk modifying her as I did you, Danny. Stop thinking of her as who she looks like. All her thoughts and feelings are now my thoughts, my feelings. Her brain has ceased operations. I'm in the process of rebuilding it, to make it my substitute. I've isolated all her previous thoughts, feelings and memories, but I'm putting them back together differently than I did with yours. She will be only what you were intended to be, a vessel for me to use while waiting to complete my mission."

"This is another instance of your bull shit, Caleb. I told you I wanted her for my girlfriend. You agreed to help me. I'm going to be fucking her. A lot. I don't care where you need to go while I'm doing that, but the deal I made was for me to have her as my girlfriend, and to fuck her. Maybe you can fix it so that I can share some of my energy with her while you're gone somewhere else."

"If we were to do that, I'd need yet another host. This time it couldn't be another girl, because you'd just end up wanting her too."

"Sounds all right to me. Do you need for the host to be a stiff, or to be brain dead?"

"I don't need that, but it seems somewhat callous for me to take over an otherwise viable life form."

"The guy I'm thinking of, you'd be doing him a huge favor if you took him over. You can fix anything that's wrong with him, right?"

"Of course. Still, you were for all intent and purposes already dead, and you still seemed to resent my investiture."

"This is different, a lot different. Did you run across any of my memories about Chico Villareal, a friend of mine, another fighter?"

"The one who had that automobile accident down in Mexico? The quadriplegic?"

"That's him. I was thinking that you could really help him out if you did the same thing for him that you did for Lindsey. He's not brain dead or anything, but he can't do squat for himself. He lives in this place over in Hermosilla, in Mexico? They feed him, wipe his ass, and do everything else he can't do for himself anymore. He's thirty years old, and hasn't moved his own arms or legs by himself in about eight years. I visited him about six months after he got hurt. I was fighting in Hermasillo then. He wanted me to help him die, but I couldn't do it. You, me, and Lindsey, we could fly down there to see him."

"Why him? Why not someone easier, someone closer by?"

"Lindsey, that's why. When Chico and me ran together, we used to share some of the girls we got. Not like those threesome's you see on the internet, and none of that queer stuff either. We took turns, that's all. Sometimes, we'd have two girls and we'd switch. I didn't mind doing that, and neither did he. Right now, if he's even still alive, I'm sure he'd take any deal he can get. The point is, you'd have another guy who wouldn't mind you taking over his body. We could both fuck Lindsey then, and we wouldn't have to be arguing over it. Chico was a great guy too. If you could help him like this, I'd be grateful to you for doing it."

It took some time to get Danny a new passport, over a month. While they were waiting, Danny engaged in another boxing match. This time it was on the under card of a heavyweight title bout. Lindsey was at ringside for the fight, and she got more press attention than any of the fighters. Danny put his guy away in quick order, showering and changing quickly to go join Lindsey before the main event got started.

It was an uneven bout, with the Russian champion looking slow and sluggish for the first five rounds. His American opponent had to be ahead on all the judges scorecards, but he got too careless in the early part of the sixth round and ended up being knocked down twice in the round. He survived to come out for the seventh, but was quickly stopped by a straight right hand.

During the after fight interviews by the reporters on hand, Danny was asked about his relationship with Lindsey.

"We're just good friends." Danny smiled and had his arm around Lindsey's shoulders protectively as he said this.

"Are you just friends, or are you lovers too?" Danny recognized the reporter. He was a man who had "dogged" Danny every chance he got. He'd written several columns deriding Danny's boxing skills.

"That's none of your business, Frank. We're friends. However we choose to interpret that friendship is our business."

Two days after Danny's passport arrived, he and Lindsey flew down to Hermosillo. They didn't find Chico at the home where'd he'd been the last time Danny had come to see him. He got another address from the people at the home, but Chico wasn't there either. Those people had a son, a twelve or thirteen year old boy, who agreed to take Danny and Lindsey to where Chico now lived.

When they got there, Danny was appalled at the squalor Chico was being forced to live in. The state government had this building where people like Chico existed, waiting to die. The smell alone was almost indescribable. Living, if that was what you could call it, all bunched together, each patient having an open bay consisting of eight feet by seven feet of space. It was enough for an old surplus army style cot and the two or three cardboard boxes containing all of Chico's personal belongings.

All these patients were cared for by a Catholic charity group consisting of lay sister's of the church. Danny took a deep breath and walked over to where the kid pointed. The individual he saw laying on that cot might or might not be Chico. Danny couldn't tell just by looking.

"Is that really you, Chico? Man, you look like shit." The hard black eyes staring back at him from that wasted body were really all that remained of his old friend and sometimes sparring partner. Seeing those eyes brought home to Danny that this was, indeed, his old friend.