I was always used to people smothering me back home. Italian in blood, our family was always big. Three big brothers and a little sister left little room for private time, especially when your father was a very successful Marine in his time and had contractors practically banging down the door. We always had money and space enough to house my natal family AND grandparents. And it was still so hard to find time to myself, it was suffocating. A big school didn't help. Crowded bunkers didn't help later down the road. I used to add time to myself as a prayer at night.
Floating down the rapids, I wished I was back in my crowded house with my destructive sister and her boyfriends and the animals and grandparents breathing down my neck every time I tried to take a nap, asking if I was okay. Everyone was nosy and wanted to know what everyone else was doing, and it was infuriating.
I wished my nonna would yank me out of the water and demand to know what I was doing for the past ten years since she died. I wished my brothers were there to cannon ball on top of me and call me a pansy when I punched them for it. I wished my sister Carla was there to scoff at me and raid my closet for a college party she was going to queen bee. I wanted my mother to start yelling at me for dripping on her nice hardwood floors. I wanted my father to give me the noogie of all noogies for getting kidnapped by aliens when I was suppose to be in Pakistan shooting some cult leader. Wish, wish, wish.
I faded in and out willingly. Even if I didn't die in the next twenty-four hours, I had no hope of getting off a planet with other planets hanging in the sky instead of a moon. Where it was almost never nighttime. Where giant alien geckos were hunting me down for no reason other than they could.
I was safer just drowning.
So I hated waking up when my limp body floated under a waterfall and was pounded into consciousness. I backpedaled in the water, my back colliding with the rocks behind the heavy wall of water, forcing my tired body up the incline of slippery stone. It was concave behind the waterfall, just enough to give me room to scoot back and sit without being seen from outside.
I wasn't thinking all too clearly. I know I was a conditioned soldier, but Staff Sgt. Leonard never prepared his cadets for alien abduction. I sat there, dripping, staring at the crashing water with dirty blonde bangs falling over my eyes, mourning the loss of my trusty skorpion with random hums of pop songs.
I sat for roughly an hour before moving. My semi-damp clothes rubbed all the wrong places raw. I moved minimally, my senses coming back in small portions. Those things hadn't appeared again. I didn't think about that traitorous companion. He was a lost asset in my mind.
I stopped humming and took a short look around me. It was still bright outside. Behind me was nothing but smooth wall that water had carved over years and years. Survival instinct kicked in. There was enough room to sit, but not lay down or build a fire. I leaned back against the wall and realized I still had my pack on. It was probably the only thing that had saved me from more than a few busted ribs and I'd totally forgotten about it.
My ribcage had been protesting every movement until now and I hadn't noticed. Pain desensitization would come in handy, probably. My bones creaked wearily as I slid the strap for my rifle off and set the gun to one side, then pulled the pack straps down and stretched my legs out so my boot tips touched the water, and placed the pack on my lap. Checking what I had left helped clear my mind further. A well of fear and disbelief was squashed as training kicked in.
I tossed the extra mags for the skorpion into the waterfall. Any unnecessary weight had to go. I had a few MREs, and a black cloak that I was suppose to use to go undercover for a mission that seemed so long ago. I stared at it, then splayed it out as best I could beside me to dry. I might need cover.
Everything else seemed okay. A few stun grenades, a few REAL grenades, rifle ammo, a spare silencer, ruined papers that had been mission specs, and a Glock 17 I'd completely forgotten about stashed at the bottom. Those I didn't toss out. I stuck the wet papers to the wall to leave behind if I ever grew the balls to venture back outside. They floated too easily. I wasn't sure what the terrain looked like outside the waterfall, but I didn't want the chance of the papers being spotted. By the time they dried, if they slipped off, I'd be long gone.
The pack was small and the cloak took up a lot of room, so that was about it. The side pouches were full of tampons and a bowie knife. I stared at it listlessly and stuck it in one of the loops of my cargo pants, the Glock I stuck in a pocket. I'd rather have it out and ready than stuffed in a backpack. The only other thing in the pack was a small waterproof pouch that carried my high-tech phone and iPod. Despite the Marine training and tough guy exterior, I was still a young woman. A young woman who kept an uzi in her underwear drawer, next to the frilly Santa lingerie, but still a woman. The iPod gave me some connections to Earth still. The phone was useless, but the iPod might keep me sane if I was stuck on this rock. Until the battery ran out, anyway.
Dunno what made me go back outside. It could've been the fight or flight instinct still in gear. Or it could have been the freakishly huge furred snake that slithered out of the water and into my little hidey-hole from the water. Whatever it was, I jumped over the creature as fast and as far as I could, and was surprised when I felt rock beneath my boots in the water. I was closer to land than I thought I'd been. I forced myself to be still in the water, waiting for either the snake or the hunters to lash out at me. Neither happened. After several minutes of waiting, I lifted my foot silently from the water and high-stepped to the bank, remembering the full week of water training in BT.
Deciding a higher vantage point would benefit, I swung up into a tree after enough walking away from the little pond and pretty waterfall. It was harder than it was back home. The bark was slippery, the sap more like oil than syrup and coating the entire trunk. I managed. Further up the tree were the strangest birds I'd ever seen in a nest of small bones. They were blue, shimmering, and loaded with an orange beak lined with protruding sharp teeth. Two of them sat side-by-side in the nest, black unblinking eyes that took up most of their heads staring straight at me. I froze mid-stretch, fingertips brushing the next branch up, and waited.
It took seven minutes of just staring at them and their little teeth before I finally, slowly made a move to hoist myself up. One of them ruffled their feathers at the movement, but otherwise they both stayed completely silent, just staring, never blinking. It creeped me the fuck out.
But they weren't attacking, so I wasn't going to bother them. Of course they couldn't grant me the same courtesy. One of them, the larger one, probably the man of the nest, hopped off onto the branch and started hopping toward me.
"Git!" I hissed as the bird fluttered around to my branch, me scooting back as far as I could without the branch thinning out and breaking. The thing swiped at my foot with a reptilian tail I hadn't noticed before, the sides covered in wicked looking spikes almost as long as it's orange chicken legs. What the fuck, man. Even the birds wanted to kill me on this fucking planet.
I leaned forward, bowie ready, waiting for the thing to get close enough. It'd be safer just to shoot it, quieter to slice it's head off. The bird cocked it's head at the knife, then squealed. Loud.
"Shit!" I hissed under my breath, leaning back and crushing it between the tree trunk and my boot. The small body caved easily with a disgusting 'splurt!', but the tail kept moving. I jerked away before it could dig into me and watched the ruined body peel away from the trunk and plummet to the ground. Then the other demon bird started squealing. Acting on instinct I flung the bowie end-over-end directly between it's eyes. The squeal died off, the bird swayed, then splayed across the nest and the green speckled eggs that were hidden beneath the two.
My heart raced in my chest, so hard I could hear the blood rushing in my ears and I brandished the rifle, looking around wildly for any sign of the hunting party. I didn't hear anything, but that fact wasn't helpful. My treacherous companion had moved silently through the under brush despite his enormous size and even though the other three were bigger I was betting they could pull the same trick. Add that onto their invisibility trick and it equaled me screwed.
It took some slippery maneuvering, but I managed to swing myself around the slick trunk to retrieve my knife. I dropped the bird's body to the ground below with a sniff and a sneer, then looked at the unprotected nest and the four eggs inside. My mind screamed 'food!'. If the yolks looked like anything I was used to I'd try it. MREs were not my meal of choice.
The eggs fit snuggly in one of the pack's pouches. And I hadn't been attacked yet or heard anything like the clicking and chattering 'friend' had made, so I figured I was safe enough for now.
Here I'd thought I'd been pretty damn smart to figure out getting to a higher vantage point, and all I could see was more and more forest. Something bigger than a horse flew over the trees in the distance and I hugged the trunk so tight the sap soaked into my hair, trying to become invisible. I was officially scared shitless. A lone human woman trapped on an alien planet where they didn't believe in camaraderie and the horses flew and the birds ate you and the giant squids walked the earth. Up until then I'd kept myself calmer thinking there was some hope, some way to get off, a lot of that having to do with the fact that I was with another humanoid who seemed like he knew what he was doing.
Fucker.
The horse bird flew off in the opposite direction and disappeared in the clouds as a small speck, but I was under the impression now that the birds here stuck together in twos. I wasn't chancing running into it's mate. I wrapped both arms around the trunk and allowed myself to slide down slowly, then kept moving in the same direction the river had flowed. Whatever took me away from all the goddamn aliens.
I didn't have a plan. What kind of plan was I suppose to make on a completely different planet? My waterproof digital watch/compass was useless. It kept scrolling nonstop across the different directions, back and forth without stopping, like it didn't even know where it was. The poles here were all kinds of screwed up. There was no choice now but to keep walking until I found something similar to shelter, and even then, any cave or hollow tree I found was probably occupado with something else that wanted to eat me. I hated it, but I felt completely lost.
I walked. That was the plan. Keep moving. I walked. And walked. Killed another of those furred snakes with my bowie. And walked. The scenery barely changed, but my watch told me I had walked in the same direction for three hours. Surely there was some kind of civilization or at least a clearing on this planet.
Surely.
"There has to be something else on this rock," I whispered breathlessly to myself. "Has to be."
Fifteen minutes later the ground finally inclined. The small drop-off gave way to brighter sky between the trees, and my heart jumped a little. I fought myself not to run for sunlight, for open air, for something to stave off the humidity that was clogging my lungs and sticking my clothes to my body.
I walked into a campsite in a crouch, rifle at the ready, and wished I had kept my thoughts to myself.
The clearing was one giant campsite made of bare trees and gore and tribal totems eleven feet tall. I froze and stared, dread seeping into my bones. Bones that could very easily litter this campsite floor very soon if I didn't leave. Because it more than likely belonged to the things that had attacked me.
Movement out of the corner of my eye. I dropped to one knee and brought the rifle up, breath held, steadily aiming at the one thing I least expected to see.
"HA."
The alien that had abandoned me was tied to one of the totems at the edge of the clearing, to the left of where I had walked out of the woods. At least I was pretty sure it was. Same taupe colored abs surrounded by dark scales. He had been stripped bare save a tattered leather loincloth covering his groin, and I finally caught a glimpse of what was under that plain, yet grossly intimidating mask of his.
It looked like an angry woman's crotch protected by tusks. I pressed a dirt covered wrist against my mouth to stifle a hysterical laugh at the thought. So they'd caught him anyway. He was the one who left me to be eaten by mutant dogs, and HE'D been the one captured. I took a step closer, peering at an angle to try and get a better look, to see if he was dead or alive to be useful, when more movement on the other side of the camp made me duck down behind the angular black totem he was tied to.
As quietly as I could, I checked my rifle and carefully pulled my bowie from it's place. Something spoke quietly. Footsteps, multiple footsteps, crunched through the mud of the campsite. Whatever it was wasn't the hunters. They were quiet as death.
"Looks like we're not the only ones being hunted."
I jumped and jerked out from behind the tree with a startled shout. "Holy shit, you're people!"
Said people were training five different guns on me now. One woman, armed, and six men, four of them well armed. All looked worse for wear, much how I imagined I looked. None of them were too keen on lowering their weapons until I flopped my arms out and back down.
"Guys, please don't shoot me. I've been through enough shit today."
Unfortunately the sound of voices also woke the bound alien. And boy was he pissed.
He jerked and yanked powerfully against the metal chains holding him with a furious snarl, tusked mandibles spread wide as his deep set gold eyes scanned the little gathering of humans. I myself jumped back as they trained their weapons instead on the alien, who quieted down to angry growls but kept his tusks spread wide in warning.
"Shut up, jackass."
The woman of their group let out an astounded gasp and stared at me. So what, she hadn't been almost killed because of him. Excuse me for taking it a little bit personal.
The alien's beady eyes found me and his top mandibles clacked together. I bared my teeth at him and took four steps closer, until I was close enough to see the tiny pupils centering the hazel irises.
"Thanks a lot for leaving me to the dogs, fucker. Now what're you gonna do? Huh?"
"What are you doing?" one of the men with glasses whispered loudly, looking around the campsite like he expected it to blow up at any second. For all any of us probably knew it could.
I ignored him and stalked around the totem, looking for the knot to the giant lizards chains. I found it and dropped my rifle back to my hip, already working on the knot amidst the creature's growls and purrs.
"That's not a good idea," the woman barked, peering frantically up at the creature through stringy dark locks.
One of the men dressed like a prisoner stomped forward to stop me. "What the fuck are you doing, bitch? Don't let that thing go!"
I paused and glared at him. "Do you really think if he was the one hunting us he'd be tied up? Don't be a fucking redneck. He can help us."
"You don't know that!" the woman insisted, panicked. "This is a mistake. We have to leave! Now!"
"Yeah, actually, I do know," I snapped, fingers digging against the hard metal chains again.
"Hey, where's the tough guy?" Specs suddenly asked.
I paused and glanced around quickly, lips pursed.
"He left us!"
Well, someone was taking that a little too personally. She sounded like a pissed off wife.
"Darwin, sweetheart," I stated matter-of-factly, then gave the alien a look. "Stop growling at me, I'm trying."
"He is here."
Several heads turned as the single black man in the group spoke with a thick African accent, right before he was impaled on an invisible weapon.
