Anywhere but Here

6

They were dark gray, four-legged, and had big, round heads with large, toothy mouths. He didn’t think they’d sneaked up just to see what he and Donna were doing. He yelled, “Close your door!” and slammed the driver’s door, then lunged across the seat and grabbed the passenger door just as one of the creatures leaped for him. It clipped the end of the door as he swung it around and fell back to the ground with a loud yelp of surprise.

“Donna, are you all right?” Trent shouted, but the screeching sound from the back of the truck didn’t sound good. He flipped open the glove box and grabbed the pistol, aimed it out the passenger window, and fired at the nearest dog-creature. The noise was deafening inside the cab, and he didn’t even come close to hitting his target, but the shot did what he’d hoped it would do anyway: all of the creatures on that side of the truck turned tail and ran into the night. Trent spun around on the seat and fired out the driver’s window, and the few on that side that hadn’t already fled left claw marks in the grass as they skedaddled—except for the one that his wild shot had hit. That one flipped end over end, yelping and contorting its body from side to side as it ran blindly into the thicket, bounced off the net of branches, and fell over, still twitching and howling in pain.

Trent didn’t give it a second glance. He threw open the door and raced around to the back of the truck, where he saw a big splash of blood in the spotlight’s glare, with another of the round-headed creatures twitching in the middle of it. Donna stood in the camper doorway, a look of total surprise on her face and a bloody butcher knife in her hand.

“Are you all right?” he gasped.

“I was putting it away,” she said.

“What?”

“I was making sandwiches while you were cutting brush. I thought I’d better put everything away before we started driving again, and then you shouted to close the door and I turned to do it but the… the whatever it was jumped for me and I just instinctively put my hands up and I… I got him in the throat.”

“Jesus. I guess you did.” She was breathing hard, and she held the knife as if it might turn on her next. He looked out into the circle of light around the truck. He didn’t see any of the creatures, but he didn’t expect they would stay spooked for long. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get out of here.”

She turned away and tossed the knife into an open drawer, slid the drawer shut, and grabbed the two ham sandwiches sitting on the countertop. “All right.”

Trent covered her with the gun while she climbed up into the cab, then slammed the camper door and went around to climb up on the driver’s side. When he had slammed that door and rolled up the windows, he lowered the gun and leaned back in the seat. “Damn, that was a little too close,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Donna. Her eyes were wide as saucers, and her hands shook until she set them in her lap, the sandwiches still clutched in either hand.

Trent wasn’t doing much better. He slowly eased his finger off the pistol’s trigger, popped open the cylinder and ejected the two spent cases, then refilled the cylinder with fresh bullets from the glove box. He left the pistol next to the flashlight on the seat between them.

“You sure you’re okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. How about you?”

“My ears are ringin’ like crazy, but other than that, I’m all right.”

“Okay, then,” she said. “Let’s get out of here. We got people to rescue.”

“The blind leading the blind,” Trent said, but he released the brake and accelerated up the hill.

He stopped at the top and pointed out where he’d seen the parachute go down. It was right below Orion, which was way low on the horizon here, and tilted on its left side. “We just aim for the belt and we’re bound to run across ’em,” he said.

“The belt?” Donna said. “What about that bright light on the horizon next to Betelgeuse?”

Trent didn’t know Betelgeuse from apple juice, but he saw the light she meant. “That looks like a star to me. There’s sky below it.”

“There’s not usually two bright stars in Orion’s right shoulder.” She got the computer out of its slot under the dash and woke it up, then stuck it up against the windshield to let the webcam get a view of the stars. She fed that image to the navigation program and clicked the pointer on the star next to the horizon, and a label popped up next to it: Sirius.

“Sirius?” She asked. “But that’s way south and east of Orion.” She pulled down a menu and got a more detailed information window. “Oh, okay. It’s only 9.6 light-years away. I guess it could move quite a ways across the sky even in a short jump to Alpha Centauri.”

Trent leaned over next to his window and looked up to Cassiopeia, where the Sun added an extra leg to its “W.” A short jump. Donna said, but it was far enough to move a couple of stars, at least. And after just being attacked by wild animals, he suddenly felt a long ways from home.

While Donna folded up the computer and put it back under the dash, he radioed Greg and told him they were on their way. “And just for future reference,” he told him, “You might think to warn people about the pack animals that run around out here at night. They weren’t in your chamber of commerce brochure.”

Greg sounded surprised. “Holy shit, did you run into a pack of hoodlums?”

“Is that what you call ’em? Big round-headed doggy things?”

“Those are hoodlums. But they’ve pretty much abandoned the woods around Bigtown. We haven’t seen any in a couple of months.”

“Well, they haven’t abandoned anything around here. Except us when we killed a couple.”

“You killed a couple? Just like that?”

Trent laughed. “We didn’t have a whole lot of choice. There must have been fifty of ’em.”

“Damn,” said Greg. “Well, I’m glad you made it through that okay. A lot of people haven’t been so lucky.”

“I bet.” Trent hung up the microphone and turned to Donna. “Remind me to suggest we just drive up to Jackson next time we decide to go somewhere.”

“They’ve got wolves up there,” she said. “They come down out of Yellowstone.”

“Shit.”

They ate their sandwiches while they drove. Trent bolted his down in about six bites and wished he had more, but he wasn’t about to stop and fix another sandwich while somebody was waiting on him for help. He kept the truck in low range even so. The spotlights lit up everything bright as day for a hundred yards around, but the shadows were inky black pools that could have hidden anything, and the last thing everybody needed was for the rescuers to get into an accident themselves.

They didn’t play any music this time, either. The only sound was from the truck itself: the soft whine of the motors and the squeaks and rattles as they jounced over the uneven ground. It seemed like they were forever detouring around some obstacle or another in their path, but Trent kept bringing them back into line with Orion whenever he could, and they slowly worked their way south.

He looked over at Donna and tried to imagine what that must have felt like when the hoodlum jumped her. Killing it with a knife! Trent had never had to fight anything or anyone with a knife and he never wanted to. That was way too personal for comfort.

She noticed him looking at her and said, “What?”

He looked away. “Nothin’,” he said automatically, but then he kicked himself for saying that. It wasn’t nothing. He cleared his throat and said, “Actually, that was… well, that was really something back there, coming around the side of the truck and seeing you with that knife in your hand. I wouldn’t have wanted to be one of them hoodlums just then.”

She laughed. “Just call me Xena. But don’t ask me to do it again.”

“Never.”

He risked another look at her. She had always been a babe, but right now she could cause a riot in a church. She was fully charged and glowing with the power. If they didn’t have to be somewhere in a hurry, he would be parking this truck and tearing her clothes off right here in the front seat, and by the look she was giving him, she felt the same way.

“I’m beginnin’ to see why some people like to get into trouble,” he said.

“Don’t you start thinking—”

“I’m just saying. Some people.”

“Okay.”

“Still, I bet you’d look mighty good in one of them pointy brass bras and a—”

She whacked him in the side. “About the time you start wearing a loincloth.”

“That ought to look good with a cowboy hat.”

She giggled. He laughed and reached out and gave her a squeeze on the leg, but the ride was too jouncy to let him keep his hand there for long.

After a couple of miles by the odometer, he saw a flash of light off in the distance. He flicked the trucks lights off and on a couple of times, and the other light did the same. He got on the radio again and said, “Somebody’s blinking a light at us. You had any more contact with them?”

“Nothing yet,” said Greg. “Let me give ’em another try.” He was gone a minute, then came back with, “Nope. Still silent.”

“All right. I’m bettin’ that’s them, though.”

Trent concentrated on driving. The terrain rose and fell, taking them out of sight of their target at least half the time, and when they would pop back up over a rise it would invariably be to one side or the other of where they thought it should be, but they drew steadily closer, and eventually they found themselves on a long flat stretch of grass and wild-flowers that led straight to the downed ship.

Calling it a “ship” was a courtesy, earned only because it had made the jump between planets. It looked like it had started out life as a water tank, and that life had apparently been long and hard. Long streaks of rust ran down its sides, and several irregular patches of varying age had been welded to it. If it had ever held air, it didn’t now; it had come down tilted and the side that had taken the brunt of its weight on impact had crumpled like an accordion, splitting its seams wide open.

Its glittery silver parachute lay limp on the ground, stretching off into the dark beyond it. The silvery foil was such a sharp contrast to the rusty tank that Trent would never have guessed they belonged together if he hadn’t seen the tank descending beneath it. Whoever built this rig must have spent all their money on the hyperdrive and the parachute, and made the spaceship out of the only thing they had on hand.

A white blob of fur with irregular black spots ran out to bark at them when they drew close. Trent normally didn’t like dogs much, especially the kind that screeched more than barked, like this one did, but with wild animals out there in the dark, he was happy to see this one. Then he noticed how many legs it had: at least six, plus a couple of tentacles that waved back and forth from the top of its head. That was where it kept its eyes.

A bigger creature stood atop the tank, waving a flashlight enthusiastically at the pickup. It was about four feet tall, scaly and glisteny brown rather than hairy and white, with thick, snakelike arms and legs that ended in sharp claws. It stood on four of its six legs, bending upward in the middle like a centaur. Its head was a narrow triangle with the pointy end aimed forward. It looked like it might be smiling, but then again, its mouth could just be a permanently curved slit full of fangs. Trent let off the juice and let the truck coast to a stop a couple dozen feet away.

“Oh, boy,” he said softly.

Donna took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “They could be perfectly nice.”

“Uh-huh.” He drove a little closer to the tank and parked, leaving the lights on. “You stay here until we know for sure.”

When he opened his door and stepped out, the alien shouted something like “Baki!” and waved the flashlights beam in an arc around the curved side of the tank. Did he want Trent to go around to that side? Trent reached up onto the seat for his own flashlight and, keeping an eye out for hoodlums, followed the aliens light around to a ragged hole in the side of the tank. The furry mop on the ground kept pace with him about five feet away, screeching the whole time, while the alien above yelled “Gabat!” from the top of the tank. Trent hoped it was just trying to quiet its dog, because if it was shouting at Trent, he had no idea what it wanted.

It took him a second to realize that the hole in the tank wasn’t part of the accident. Someone had made a doorway with a cutting torch and not bothered to file the edges smooth. It was only about four feet high, but it started two feet off the ground; Trent only had to lean down a little bit to keep from hitting his hat.

The inside of the tank looked like somebody had taken a moving van and shaken it, which was about what had happened, he supposed. Boxes and wooden crates and sacks of stuff were piled hip deep, and more stuff was tied to the walls and hanging from the roof. There were easily identifiable things like shovels and rakes and pitchforks in a pile near the door, with less familiar twisty things and squiggly jiggers mixed in. Some of the crates held animals—though not any animals Trent had ever seen. A three-foot yellow tentacle stuck out between the slats of one crate, weaving around in the air and blinking the eye at its tip, and the hisses, honks, and croaks coming from the other cages didn’t sound much more reassuring. The air didn’t smell so great, either.

It took a second to see the owners among all their possessions, but Trent waved his flashlight around and finally saw a bigger version of the scaly creature on top of the tank standing over another one who was lying flat on its back on a pile of blankets, and two more small ones hiding behind the standing one. These guys at least had eyes in more or less the right place, even if their limbs were more tentacles than arms. The one on its back had a bad gash on the left side of its head, still wet with dark purple blood. The standing one didn’t seem hurt, but one of the kids—if that’s what the little ones were—was cradling one of its tentacles protectively with its other one. An even smaller child hid between the standing parent’s legs, and at the sight of Trent it began to cry out in long, ear-piercing wails.

“It’s all right,” Trent said, raising his voice to be heard over the din. “I’m here to help.”

The standing parent—Trent guessed it was the mother—said something in a rapid-fire voice full of t’s and k’s. Trent missed about half of it because of the screeching mop-thing outside and the crying baby inside, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t speak whatever it is you’re talkin’.”

He felt something at his side and whirled around, banging his head against the ragged edge of the doorway, but it was just Donna. The alien mother snorted, but whether it was laughter at Trent or alarm at Donna, he couldn’t tell.

He caught his hat before it could hit the ground and wedged it back on his head. “Damn it, I thought I told you to stay put.”

Donna said, “Until we knew they were friendly. They didn’t blow your head off when you stuck it through the door, so I figured it was okay.” She edged past him. “Do they need as much help as it looks like from outside?”

He moved aside to let her have a look, keeping his flashlight pointed in through the door. She leaned in and said loudly, “Are you okay in here?” Then, softer, she said, “Oh. No, it doesn’t look like it, does it?”

The mother said something else fast, waving one of her snakey arms at the hatch that had plugged the hole and was now lying on the only bare patch of floor. It was just a big slab of metal with rubber door molding around the edge and a broken gate hinge welded to one side. The mother pointed at the hatch and then at the gash in her mate’s head.

“Got it,” Trent said. “The door broke loose and clocked him one.”

The father—if that’s what he was—had left a big puddle of purplish blood on the floor, and the side of his head was colored with it, too, but it looked like he had quit bleeding. Trent watched the alien’s chest to see if he was still breathing, and was happy to see it rise and fall in slow, even rhythm. Of course that might not be normal for one of his kind—the mother was breathing about four times as fast—but then again she had reason to be excited.

Donna squeezed in through the hatch and crawled over a pile of farm tools to the father’s side. “How’s his pulse?” she asked. “Heartbeat? Thumpa-thumpa?” She whacked her chest just left of center, then held up her left arm and put her fingers across the wrist. “Do you guys normally have a pulse?”

More rapid alien speech, barely audible over the baby and the mop. The mother picked up the baby and tried to shush it with little clicking sounds, but it kept crying.

“We’re gonna need a translator,” Trent said. He went around the tank, sweeping his flashlight out into the night to make sure no hoodlums were waiting to ambush him, but there was only one pair of eyes out there, and they belonged to the mop-creature that continued to screech at him from about five feet away. He looked up at the top of the tank, where the first alien—an adolescent son, Trent guessed—still stood with its flashlight, and said, “We’re calling for help. He’ll be okay” The alien didn’t reply.

The truck’s lights were still blazing. Trent left them on and drove around to where they would do some good, and where he could stand beside it with the microphone in his hand and still see through the hatch. He keyed the microphone and said, “Trent Stinson calling Bigtown. Do you copy?”

He had to turn up the volume to hear anything over the barking mop and the crying baby, but he could make out Greg’s voice saying, “Bigtown here.”

“We’re at the landing site,” Trent said. “Turns out they’re aliens. Kinda lizardy guys, brown and slimy with four legs and two tentacles for arms. Pointy heads. You know what kind they are?”

“Can’t say as I do from that description,” Greg said.

“Well, we need somebody who can translate for ’em, because we can’t understand a word they’re savin’, and one of ’em’s got a big gash in the side of his head.”

Greg took a second to respond. “Is he conscious?” he asked.

“Nope,” Trent replied. “But he’s breathing, and he’s not bleeding anymore.”

Donna, from inside the tank, called out, “He’s got a heartbeat, but it’s real fast. Faster than the one who isn’t hurt.”

Trent relayed that information to Greg, and Greg replied, “The doctor says you should probably try to wake him up. That’s what he’d do with a human patient, anyway. Pinch him or slap his cheeks or do whatever it takes, but get him awake.”

“Got it.” Trent leaned toward the doorway. “He says wake him up.”

If noise could have done it, it already would have. Donna didn’t even try that. She just turned back to Trent and said, “Get me some cold water.”

He went around back to the camper and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. He never drank bottled water at home, but it was a lot more convenient on the road to just buy a case of the stuff prepackaged than to fill a bunch of jugs and canteens. He took the hand towel from the rack beside the sink, then went back and handed the water and towel through the hatch to Donna.

She wet the towel and showed it to the mother. The mother sniffed it, then touched it gingerly, then stuck the end of her tentacle in her mouth. “Bakbak,” she said, and wiggled her head.

“Is that ‘yes’ or ‘no’?” Donna asked. She lowered the towel toward the fathers head and asked, “Yes?”

“Bakbak,” the mother said again.

“Well, she isn’t trying to stop me,” Donna said, and she laid the towel on his sloping forehead. She gave that a few seconds, but when it didn’t wake him she dribbled a little water directly onto his face. The mother bent down next to him and said loudly, “Magalak! Kanado!” She patted him under his toothy jaw, then when that didn’t work she took a deep breath and gave him a good slap on the end of his nose.

That did the trick. The father snorted and turned his head aside, then he opened his eyes and tried to raise up. “Ti, ti!” the mother said, holding him down.

He groaned and raised his left tentacle to his temple. He tried to wet his lips with his tongue, then croaked, “Gatsa.”

Donna handed him the water bottle. He looked at it for a moment, and at her, then he took a tiny sip and said more heartily, “Gatsa.”

He drank a little, then tried to sit up again, and this time the mother let him. He winced at the pain in his head, but he managed it, then he looked out the door into the intense light from the pickup. “Onnescu,” he said softly, and there was wonder in his voice.

“Bakbak,” the mother said. She said something more to him that Trent couldn’t catch, and he replied with more incomprehensible words, and they twisted their tentacles together.

Donna said, “That’s right, this is Onnescu. You made it. It looks like you came here to stay.”

They damned near came here to die, Trent thought, but he didn’t say anything. They had survived the landing, and it certainly looked like they had brought enough stuff to start a new life with. That’s probably why they had landed so hard; there had to be a couple tons of tools and animals and who knew what else in their makeshift spaceship. Trent saw the corner of a chest of drawers peeking out from behind a crate of animals, and a black metal box that looked for all the world like a steamer trunk beside that.

The father swung his legs around to the only patch of bare floor left and slowly stood, leaning hard on his mate. He was wobbly, but he made it, standing there with the side of his head all covered with dried blood. Then he saw the little one holding its right tentacle protectively with its left, and he bent down and spoke softly to it.

The mother answered for it, and the little one held out its tentacle. There was a big purple spot about halfway up, and when the father gently touched it, the little one cried out in pain.

“Can you break one of those?” Trent asked.

“I wouldn’t think so,” Donna said, “but something’s sure wrong with it.”

What to do about it was even less obvious. Trent got on the radio with the doctor again, and the doctor advised bringing the father and the young one into town for him to look at.

It took a while to get that across to the alien family, but they pantomimed the father and the child climbing into the pickup and driving off several times until the aliens finally got it. The father clearly didn’t like that idea, and Trent couldn’t blame him. He didn’t know Trent and Donna from Adam, and he wasn’t about to abandon all his animals and possessions, nor leave his wife and the other two kids with them while he ran off to town—though the doctor said with a head wound like his, that’s exactly what he should do. The father pantomimed that he was okay, that he would take it easy for a few days and he would be fine. But he couldn’t very well say that about his child.

At last they settled on a solution: Katata, the mother, would take the injured child and the baby to town with Trent and Donna, while the father and his oldest son would stay with the animals and start their farm right where they landed. That had probably been his intent in coming down where he did: to be close enough to town that he could take things in to market, but far enough away that the land wouldn’t already be claimed yet. He’d succeeded in that. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the hard landing, he’d have succeeded at everything he’d set out to do. Trent had to give the guy his grudging respect. It was one thing to seal up a truck and head into the great unknown for a job hunt, but to do it in a rusty water tank, with all your family and all your possessions, one way—that took guts. And desperation. Trent couldn’t imagine what conditions on this alien’s home planet must be like if this looked like a good idea to him.