Alien Avatar: An Alien Sci-Fi Romance Page 15

  He missed the smell of cooking food. Nobody thought that it was wise to start a fire in the tunnels. With nowhere for the smoke to go, it seemed like a recipe for a thousand dead Halians. They had enough food to go around. Nobody would starve. But a hot meal does wonders for the body, and it would still be weeks before anybody had a chance to eat one.

  Unless the tribe liked his idea.

  Marko was excited to share. It seemed completely feasible, and all indications were that it would solve a number of problems all at the same time. Problems seemed few and far between. They hadn’t seen any animals taking shelter in the tunnel where they’d entered through the collapsed section. There seemed to be so much surface area that flooding didn’t seem like an issue either, and if that was a concern, then it shouldn’t be hard to create drainage ducts in addition to the escape tunnels.

  He tried to anticipate any problems, formulated possible solutions so that he would be as fully prepared to address them as he could be.

  All in all, he liked the idea, and hoped others would like it too. Marko was used to roughing it, and he didn’t need many luxuries to remain happy, but a glimpse of the sky and a campfire would go a long way to keeping his spirits up through the duration of the journey.

  Then again, as long as he didn’t have to spend many days apart from Naeesha, he simply wouldn’t need all that much cheering up. She was more than enough to keep him happy, no matter how cold, hungry, or tired of the dark he got.

  He spotted her walking down the tunnel and swept her up in an embrace, giving her a big kiss before setting her back down.

  “Missed you,” she said.

  “Let’s not do that again.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Do you know how soon they’re going to start the big circle?”

  “No, why?”

  “I’ve got an idea that I want to share.”

  “Yea?”

  “You can hear about it when everyone else does,” he said with a coy smile.

  Naeesha gave him a gentle push before pulling him back, holding herself close.

  “What, you’re not going to treat me special?” she said. “Maybe I should stop treating you so special.”

  The last, she said in barely a whisper, leaning in so close that Marko could feel her breath on his cheek. He suspected that the way her thigh pressed between his legs was not an accident. His breath caught in the back of his throat, and only came out as a raspy sigh.

  “No, I don’t think I would like that.”

  She slid her hand down from his back, around his waist, and into his robe, her fingers inching slowly downward, in no particular hurry to get to any particular place.

  “So tell me, what do you want?”

  He swallowed hard.

  “I want…” he leaned forward and whispered into her ear “I want you to climb on top of me while everyone is asleep, and I want you to fuck me absolutely silly.”

  He heard her laugh, felt her cheek pressed up against his turn into a smile.

  “Okay,” she said. “Now let's talk about what I want from you.”

  Marko glad that it was so dark in the tunnels, or the entire tribe would have been able to see just how excited he was for Naeesha to continue on that subject. Unfortunately, Rakkan announced that it was time to gather for the circles before she had a chance to do so.

  He shuffled awkwardly towards the wall, taking a seat near the center of the big circle next to Naeesha.

  It had been his plan to spent the first few minutes of circle thinking about what he would say. He’d already rehearsed a number of times, but he wanted one last chance to go through his proposal. Naeesha had other plans. Her hand kept wandering into his lap, touching him in ways that made thinking - among other things - terribly hard.

  When Rakkan turned and indicated that it was his turn to share, he just about choked.

  With a nervous cough and a poorly concealed erection, he hastily stumbled through his suggestion for digging tunnels up to the surface after the tribe stopped moving each day. He went through his talk on autopilot, and when he sat down with burning cheeks, he could hardly remember what he’d said to the group.

  He looked around, hoping to gauge their reactions, but it was too dark to see their faces and their ears were already turned to another speaker.

  “How’d I do,” he whispered to Naeesha.

  “Mmm, delicious as always.”

  “I… what? I meant on the speech.”

  “Darling, I don’t speak Halian, I couldn’t even begin to tell you.”

  Marko had hoped for a different answer. He didn’t feel great about it, and he seriously needed some affirmation that he’d made his case well and that it would be well considered.

  He couldn’t help but feel a little resentful of Naeesha for distracting him with her poorly timed romance.

  By the time they sat down to eat, the seed of resentment had blossomed into an ugly tree, and he could hardly sit next to her without a burning pit lighting up in his stomach. She didn’t seem to understand that he was upset, much less why, which only made him feel worse. Every passing moment intensified the feeling. Nobody was even talking about his proposal. They were all concerned with more prosaic concerns.

  He went to bed angry, giving Naeesha a perfunctory kiss and nothing more. It took him ages to get to sleep, his mind stewed in his rage, and he spent an hour - maybe longer - thinking of what he should have done or said differently.

  But he must have fallen asleep at some point, because that seemed like a necessary precursor to being startled awake.

  There was a hand on his shoulder, shaking him gently. He remembered what he’d told Naeesha earlier.

  “No,” he muttered, his body still shaking the last threads of sleep.

  A leg slipped over his lap, and another hand settled on his other shoulder.

  “Stop, I just want to sleep.”

  The hands slid up his chest.

  “Naeesha,” he sighed, the night’s frustration seeping back into his voice.

  “Yea baby?” she groaned, as though just rousing from sleep.

  Her voice came from his side, as though she was lying a few feet away. The hands slid further up his chest and clamped around his neck, tight enough that he couldn’t breathe. He grabbed at them, finding a pair of wrists too small to be Naeesha’s. His heart started to pound and he tried to scream but words wouldn’t come out. He struggled to sit up, but whoever was on top of him was stronger than he was.

  “Marko?” Neesha cooed again. “What’s wrong?”

  He reached up, trying to find some part of his attacker to grab hold of, but he couldn’t reach past their arms. He reached out to the side and found a flashlight, flicking it on and casting a bright beam across the ground, in the face of several sleeping Halians, and then up at his attacker.

  Whoever - whatever - it was, he’d never seen anything like it before.

  Naeesha thought she’d heard Marko say something, but she must have been imagining things. She rolled over, got comfortable, and tried to go back to sleep. A few feet away, some inconsiderate asshole flicked on a flashlight and started waving it around. They managed to shine the light right into her eyes, leaving her just about blind.

  She cursed softly to herself, wondering why the hell somebody needed a light, and couldn’t have the decency to keep it out of sleeping people’s faces.

  And then she heard struggling. Nearby. Something a few feet away from her lit up in the still-waving beam of the flashlight, but she couldn’t make it out. It looked like a person kneeling over somebody’s sleeping body.

  Marko’s sleeping body. She strained her eyes to get a better look at whatever was happening, there was still an after-glow of the light burned into her vision, but it was starting to fade.

  It was definitely a person, but it didn’t look like a Halian. Their arms were too long, the color of their skin more brown than red. And no tell-tale third eye, as far as she could tell. Her heart started pounding as she realiz
ed that whoever it was, they were attacking Marko. At least, that’s what it looked like. The stranger’s arms were extended, and it looked like they had their hands around Marko’s throat.

  Naeesha pushed herself upright, blinking back sleep and trying to make more sense of the situation. She could see Marko flailing, trying to reach out and hit his attacker. He couldn’t reach.

  But Naeesha could.

  She grabbed her own flashlight from beside her bedroll. The body of the light was cast from one solid block of aluminium. It was far larger than necessary, but that was because a light like this was made for more than illumination. Holding it by the wrong end, she drew her arm back and swung the light with a hard backhand.

  The two-foot long metal handle hit the attacker in the shoulder with a commanding thud. She held back on the blow. Her intention wasn’t to kill whoever this was, merely get them off Marko.

  And it worked. The person - surprisingly thin, bald headed, and very possibly not wearing any clothes as far as she could see - fell to the side, clutching their wounded arm, and hissing . Marko shined the flashlight up at Naeesha, blinding her again. She could hear his heavy, ragged breathing as he gasped for air. Another flashlight clicked on and swept across the room. Then another, and another, all of them flicking around the hallway before eventually settling on the injured attacker.

  The feeling that swept through the Halian camp was a strange one. It was a mixture of fear, of curiosity, and of barely restrained horror. She felt the bite of adrenaline on the back of her tongue as a thousand Halian’s fight or flight responses kicked into high gear.

  Naeesha rubbed her eyes with her free hand, trying to massage her vision back to life. She still couldn’t see much. Light and shadow, blurred by the streak of white across the middle.

  Gasps and whispers spread through the camp. Although she couldn’t understand the words that the Halians were saying, she recognized the scared tone. She could hear their worry. Feel their uncertainty. And as her vision slowly returned, she understood why.

  The person who attacked Marko was, well, not any kind of person that Naeesha had ever seen before. They were tall and lanky to the extreme. Their limbs suggested someone who was damn near starving to death, and their eyes were sunken and hollow to the point that she couldn’t see their eyes at all, just black sockets.

  And the way that they moved as they tried to climb back to their feet, fleeing from Naeesha and the other thousand Halians, it was… uncanny. Like a robot with a dying battery, or a drunk with a broken leg, all its movements disjointed and simultaneous jerky and listing.

  That alone was unsettling, but it as her vision improved, the terror of the creature only got worse. Naeesha realized that the reason she couldn’t see its eyes was that it didn’t have any eyes at all. And its body was so unwieldy because so much of it was broken. At least one of its ankles was completely shattered, its foot bent at an impossible angle and dragging behind it.

  But no. That wasn’t the worst of it at all.

  Naeesha couldn’t have begun to speculate what color the creature’s skin had been originally, but now it was a sickly yellow-brown of desiccated meat. Its skin was dry and leathery, split and cracking at its joints.

  It had all the hallmarks of being long dead and partially decaying, much like the soldier they’d seen earlier. Except, of course, for the fact that it had been trying to kill Marko, and was still shambling away.

  Not to escape, Naeesha realized, but in order to find another victim to attack. It turned to an older Halian, one of the musicians, and started grabbing at her with one arm. The one that Naeesha had hit was still hanging limply at its side.

  Naeesha jumped over Marko and hit the creature again, low, in the back. It hunched over and hissed again, louder than last time, and turned around. It reached out and grabbed onto Naeesha’s robe. She was surprised by how strong it was when it nearly pulled her over.

  She brought the flashlight down hard on its arm, just above the elbow. The blow didn’t faze it. She hit it again, this time in the side of the head, but the creature was completely unaffected. Naeesha kept swinging the light, the heavy club-handle smashing into the creature’s bony head over and over and achieving nothing. It craned its neck towards, her, it's jaw dropping to reveal a mouth of rotted and broken teeth, as though it intended to bite her.

  No matter how hard she pushed, she couldn’t put any distance between herself and the corpselike monster. Even with one hand, it was stronger than her. Its stinking, yawning mouth inched closer to her neck. She wondered if its jaw was as strong as its arms.

  She could feel its breath on her skin, hot and sticky. Naeesha pulled back as far as she could but it was no use. The monster’s dried and shriveled lips touched her skin, only for a second before releasing an awful howl. It released her, and she pulled away, throwing herself backwards and tripping over someone's bed, falling to the ground.

  The monster dropped too, hitting the ground with an awful sound like a pile of loose wood falling onto stone. She realized that it was cut neatly in half. Marko was standing behind it in his hulking armored combat form, his bladed right arm still held out to his side, frozen in his follow through.

  That didn’t stop the creature from trying to attack him. Its legs kicked uselessly around while the top half dragged itself over to Marko, grasping at his legs. Marko backed away, out of the monster’s reach. Unable to go after its original target, it turned, cornered the musician against the wall, and grabbed onto her leg. The dismembered monster climbed up the terrified old woman, and three people, Marko included, couldn’t pull it off. It kept climbing, reached up with one hand, and crushed the old woman’s skull.

  A feeling of stunned horror swept through the camp. Naeesha watched, frozen in place as the creature dropped back to the ground and started pulling itself to the closest Halian civilian.

  Marko brought his bladed arm down on the creature’s neck, but it didn’t do anything but make the creature even angrier. It crawled on unimpeded, moving faster than ever. The terrified Halians scattered, but the halls were packed too tightly and people started falling and tripping all over each other. They couldn’t run away fast enough. The creature got a hold of another Halian, a young adult. Naeesha didn’t see what happened. She was too busy trying to run the other way, trying to push through the wall of scared people. When she turned to look back, the monster was still crawling towards her, the young Halian was lying in four pieces.

  A shout rose over the noise of the crowd. The panic in the room began to die down. The surging mass of people parted, and Jintak stepped out of it, walking towards the nightmarish creature and standing twenty feet from it, staring it down.

  The old man’s expression softened, and he dropped to his knees, his eyes locked on the empty pits in the monster’s head. Jintak spoke softly, Naeesha didn’t know what he was saying, but he spoke the way that a mother would speak to their favorite child, so sweet and tenderly.

  Pulling itself along the bare concrete floor, the monster crept forward.

  Another voice rose out of the crowd, joining Jintak. Then two more. They spoke just as softly, speaking the same words in unison. It sounded like a prayer.

  The creature kept coming, gnashing its awful teeth, groaning and hissing as it moved nearer with each second. It was nearly at Jintak now, just a few feet away and already grasping at the old man’s robes. He remained perfectly still, kneeling, and showing no sign of worry.

  The grip of terror over the tribe began to loosen, and Naeesha felt something else fill its place. Something like love. She couldn’t imagine why, or even how, but there it was, beyond a doubt.

  Jintak reached out and laid his hand on the creature’s cheek, stroking it tenderly. The monster reached up and grabbed onto Jintak’s arm. Naeesha held her breath and waited for the inevitable.

  But it did not come. The creature’s grip faltered and it fell to the ground. Jintak continued to chant his prayer, kept stroking the creature with reverent affection.<
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  The monster, still clawing at the air with grasping hands, crumbled like dry leaves. Naeesha stood blinking, unbelieving. It was just… gone. All that was left was a small flaking pile of something like ash.

  Jintak turned around and spoke to the group, his voice just as tender, but with renewed authority and purpose. As he spoke, Marko found her in the crowd.

  “Are you okay?” he asked with hushed urgency.

  Naeesha nodded.

  “What’s he saying?”

  Marko turned his head and listened intently. Normally when he translated, he spoke as he listened. Now though, he was completely transfixed, hanging onto every word that came from Jintak’s lips. It wasn’t until the elder was done talking that he turned back to Naeesha and translated for her.

  “If I understood correctly,” he said. “That creature was a Halian.”

  Naeesha looked down at the scattered ashes, and back up at Marko.

  “It’s been kept alive by loneliness and sorrow, the emotions giving it enough strength to go on without food or water or light. But it’s an empty life. It just sat here, waiting, in too much pain to die.”

  “And what? Jintak just prayed it to death?”

  “Sort of. The Halian’s used their ability to project their feelings to drive out the desperation that fueled that poor creature. Without the agony to sustain itself, it fell apart.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “It makes me appreciate the way that we feel. I can’t imagine being cursed with something like that. To feel solitude so strongly that I could trap myself to an eternity of sitting alone in the dark. It’s… I can’t even imagine.”

  The sad silence that followed lingered for a few minutes, before it was interrupted by a shout and a feeling of surprise and terror.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Marko looked across the crowd to see it moving towards him. People were running away again, and he stood steadfast along with Naeesha and Jintak until it thinned out enough that he could see what from.