Caveman Alien's Ransom Read online

  I put the gun into one pocket, making a mental note to give it back to whoever it belongs to. “Well, the good news is that we have air and that it's not too cold. Also, that we're alive. Most of us, I mean.” I look towards the door to the can we came in and take a deep breath. “Yeah, I guess I'll start digging a grave for ... for Alesya.” I force myself to say her name. The guilt is getting worse and I feel all numb inside.

  Heidi puts a hand on my arm, and I'm grateful for the look of understanding in her eyes. “We'll all dig. It just has to be done. And we'll share the burden. You didn't kill her, Sophia. Those aliens did.”

  “Damn right,” Caroline agrees. “We're all in this together. No one blames you for any of this.”

  The other girls express support and I give them a thankful smile. It's not making much of an impact on my guilt, but I'm glad they're trying. “Thanks, guys. Shall we just get it over with?”

  There's a lot of sticks and old branches lying around, and we each find one and start digging into a flat spot of ground fifty feet from the tuna can we came in. The ground is loose and pretty easy to dig in, so we soon have a shallow grave ready.

  We lean on our sticks and Aurora wipes sweat off her brow. “Guys, just for the record: this is the most terrible thing I've ever had to do.”

  “Oh, this was nothing,” Emilia says. “Now we actually have to put her in here.”

  Heidi scratches her head. “Yeah ... should we, though? I mean, what if this is Earth, and we're just a half mile from a city or a town or some kind? I'm sure the forensics guys would hate it if they had to dig her up again.”

  “It's not Earth,” Delyah states flatly. “These plants share no characteristics with terran species, except for the chlorophyll. They're entirely alien. And that sun in the sky is about thirty percent larger or closer than the Sun is to Earth. Further, this planet rotates faster than Earth. Notice the shadows on the ground moving faster than back home. Finally, the gravity is slightly lower. It's a little easier to move here.” She bends at the knees and then jumps straight up. “Yes, I'd estimate the gravity at about ninety percent of the one on Earth.”

  We all just look at her in silence for a moment. No one likes the bearer of bad news, but it's pretty hard to dislike Delyah. I can almost see us all sagging a little at the shoulders. I guess we were all hoping that we hadn't actually left our home planet.

  Caroline clears her voice. “Well, can't ask for a clearer answer than that. Let's just go get her. We'll feel better afterwards.”

  - - -

  As it turns out, we don't feel that much better when we have placed Alesya in her grave and filled it back up. We keep sniffling and weeping while we do it. It is pretty terrible and I can feel that this is traumatizing me pretty bad.

  But finally she's in there and there's a mound of alien dirt over her. We don't know if she was religious, but we place rocks in a cross shape on the mound as a way to mark it.

  “Should we maybe say some words-”

  I'm interrupted by an excited yell from further away in the woods. The tall woman who was the first to leave the can for real comes crashing through the vegetation. “Hey! Come here and look!”

  We all follow her in among the tall trees and the strange bushes until we see what made her excited. It's the view from a cliff that we're suddenly on.

  We're apparently on a mountain in the jungle, and from this point we can see the landscape around. It's all jungle and huge trees, green and purple and yellow all the way to the horizon.

  “Pretty nice,” I say and shield my eyes with my hand. “Looks deserted to me.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” the woman says. “It's a jungle, big whoop. But this is more exciting.”

  She walks to the edge of the forest and points triumphantly. “Now, that can't be natural.”

  We follow and peer in among the trees. There's a large pile of rocks, roughly cone-shaped and very carefully constructed, like masonry. A whole lot of wooden spears are stuck into its sides, pointing straight out like the bristles on a round hairbrush.

  “It really can't,” Caroline agrees. “Some kind of beacon?”

  “Clearly man-made,” the tall woman says and walks into the woods again. “I'm going to see if there's more. Meanwhile, you lab geniuses should try to get lost. No one will miss you.” She soon disappears in among the trees and bushes.

  Delyah takes a step forward and studies the mound from ten feet distance. “No,” she says thoughtfully. “It's not a beacon. You can't burn anything in it. It has no obvious practical function. But similar things exist on Earth. It's a message. Sharp spears pointing outwards. That usually means stay away.”

  We all look at each other, then at the dense jungle around us. It suddenly looks much more threatening. If someone doesn't want us to be here ...

  “Let's get back to the ship,” Aurora says. “It's our home base, more or less. We have to think of what to do. I don't like this place. It makes my skin crawl.”

  As soon as the words leave her mouth, there's a blood-curdling scream from the woods and we all freeze. Then there's a flapping sound in the air and something comes flying out of the woods. Something big.

  “Oh fuck,” I hear myself say before I throw myself on the ground, then turn around to keep an eye on the thing.

  It's a huge bat. No, it reminds me more of the flying dinosaurs with the bat wings and the long heads and beaks with sharp teeth. Except this one has four wings and two tails that remind me of sharks.

  The beak is long, though. And it's clearly more than big enough to comfortably carry the tall, unpleasant woman in it. She's still screaming, and I feel a chill going down my back. That's the worst sight I've ever seen and I want to cry.

  “Looks like a pterodactyl,” Delyah says from beside me. “Except they're clearly not. Completely different in most respects. Very interesting. We might be the first to discover it.”

  “Them,” Emilia corrects her. Because now we can see that there's more than just one. There's a whole flock of gigantic not-pterodactyls coming out of that jungle.

  The woman's scream is cut off like a switch and I see her hanging limply in the beak of that terrible monster as it flaps lazily away. Then I see that the flock of those things isn't following the leader. No, they're circling back. Back towards us.

  “Fuck,” I gasp and scramble to my feet with jerky, panicky movements. I've never felt my skin crawl like this before. “Run!”

  More of the girls have had that same idea, and suddenly we're all running for our lives in the direction of our tuna can.

  Then the not-dactyls scream. And I stumble and almost fall headlong into a tree trunk. Because that screechy noise is the worst I've ever heard. Nails on a chalkboard is a soothing Enya song compared to this. It goes through my bones and makes me feel like death itself is right on my tail. Which of course is totally true.

  I can hear the other girls running alongside me and behind me. A couple of them are in front of me, too, both wearing white lab coats. That means that most of the kidnapped women are behind me. I'm both relieved and frightened by that. Because on one hand the not-dactyls will eat the stragglers first, but on the other hand I want all of us to make it.

  But even I realize that right now, it's each woman for herself. I hear someone scream in terror behind me, but I don't turn around. I know what happened. One of them got taken.

  Then there's another scream of despair, and another. The swarm is descending and picking us off, one by one.

  I run as fast as I can towards where the trees are the densest, hoping that they can't follow me there. The not-dactyls are the size of big pickup trucks, and their wingspan has to be twenty feet at least.

  I zigzag between alien tree trunks and try to keep my speed up. But my throat is closing up from panic and sadness and anger and just pure terror, and I was never the most athletic chick on campus.

  Then I have to stop. There's running water straight ahead. My shoes slide on the ground and I fall on my butt as I desperatel
y try to break my speed before I fall in. I manage to stop at the bank with both feet in the water, then jerk them back before any terrible water monster can bite them off. I don't trust this planet one bit.

  I turn around and look behind me. Yeah, the not-dactyls have a little more trouble flying among the trees. And I can see some white lab coats fluttering through the woods ahead of them.

  I take three breaths and then I'm back to running. I can see the metallic shimmer of the tuna can in the distance and I speed up even more, jumping over roots and bushes and knowing that I can't keep this up much longer. My lungs ache and my legs protest with every terror-stricken step.

  Then I hear another not-dactyl scream behind me. Close behind me. And I can hear the beating of its bat-like wings and how it makes the leaves on the trees rustle when it passes them.

  I throw a glance behind me. The beak is wide open, the teeth are ugly and brown and its gape is slimy and grayish pink. Yep, that one is coming for me.

  Then I swear I can feel my heart in my mouth as I spot my dinosaur right ahead of me, the one I saw from the tuna can. Yep, that's the one. The yellow eye is unmistakable. Now I can see the rest of it, too. It has three legs and a round, massive body with scales and feathers here and there. It's about the size of a bus and has a short, thick neck that supports its immense head. I now understand why that yellow eye made such an impression on me – it's the size of a car tire and it's the only one the creature's got. One big eye right in the middle of its face. Or rather, right in the middle between its two huge mouths.

  I scrub with my feet and instinctively make myself as small as I can. I'm right between two dinosaurs, and at least one of them wants to eat me.

  Fuck. This is it for me.

  I kneel down and hug myself as I wait for one of them to snag me and chew me good. I'm so paralyzed I'm not even sobbing.

  There's no way out of this.

  Then a flash of an idea goes through my mind: the gun!

  5

  - Sophia -

  With shaking hands I get it into my hand and untangle it from my lab coat.

  But it's too late. I hear the not-dactyl right behind me, and the dinosaur in front of me is slowly shifting its position to pounce on me with one of its mouths. I bend my head down, making myself as small as I possibly can. I don't want to see this.

  Then there's a loud thud, like a huge whale hitting the ground from the top of a skyscraper, followed by a not-dactyl scream that makes me drop the gun and press my hands to my ears.

  When I look up, the yellow-eyed dinosaur's neck is at least fifty feet long and the not-dactyl is tumbling through the air away from me, still screaming furiously. It looks like the dino has head-butted the not-dactyl, because it has no other limbs that could do anything like it.

  The not-dactyl hits the trees far away with a terrible rustle of leaves, and I don't stick around to check if it's okay. I just run, shaking and sobbing.

  At least now I know where I'm running, because the tuna can is shimmering in the sunlight just a short distance away. And of course the door is shut.

  I scramble over and bang on the door. “Hey! Open! It's me! Sophia!”

  The door slides open and I dive through it, then someone slaps the button again and it slams shut.

  I collapse on the floor and just breathe furiously, and then I break down in panicked tears of terror and anger. Well, sometimes you just have to let it go. And I guess this is my time.

  I've had enough. Not only am I the bitch of the story, it looks like I'm the coward, too. “I'm all the bad ones rolled into one!” I sob, and I sense the girls exchanging glances.

  Heidi and Aurora hold me while I get to my senses.

  I look around, but the girls are blocking my view. “How many made it?”

  Caroline puts a hand on my shoulder. “Not many.”

  How can she be this calm? Norwegians are hard to shake, I guess. I stretch my neck to look past her.

  No one.

  The room is empty except for us translator lab girls in our white lab coats. Six. Alesya was the seventh.

  I count one more time. Caroline. Aurora. Emilia. Heidi. Delyah. Me.

  That's it. All the other women were taken by not-dactyls. Including the woman who found the mound of rocks. And the owner of the gun, whoever that was.

  I lean my head back against the wall. “Shit.”

  “Yeah,” Emilia agrees. “Those flying things just picked them up and – well, they're gone. We were sure you were, too.”

  “I almost was.” I tell them what happened.

  Heidi shakes her head. “So damn weird, this planet. Giant trees and weird piles of rocks and not-dactyls and sophiasauruses.”

  I frown. “And what?”

  “Sophiasauruses,” she repeats. “That dino of yours. You discovered it. And also, you're the only one who's seen it. That's the right way to name something, nicht wahr, Delyah?”

  Delyah considers it. “Not really. But I guess it works. We can do the formal classification later. That's typically not done in the field.”

  I shrug. It's a name as good as any, and I guess I can't expect to have an actually cool creature named after me. So a lumbering, three-legged ugly dinosaur that throws punches with its neck it is. It's okay. It saved me from the not-dactyl.

  But now we have much more important things to talk about. We're stranded on an alien planet with deadly wildlife everywhere. We hug each other and calm down. I probably shouldn't think it, but I'm glad I'm not here alone.

  Emilia asks the obvious question. “So. Guys. What the hell do we do?”

  We sit down and talk for a good while, but we keep going around in circles because we don't really know anything. And we try to avoid saying the thing that's on everyone's mind: we might be stuck here for good.

  In the end we don't make any decisions, except for one: we have to get water. And since I know where the stream is, because I almost fell into it, I have to go.

  “That's fine,” I say and get up again, hoping to at least not be considered the coward of the group. “But can I have company, please? Just one is enough.”

  “Sure.” Caroline gets up and takes off her lab coat. “We'll get water. Do we have anything that can be used as a bucket to carry it in?”

  We don't, but Emilia claims to have seen a bush with very large, funnel-shaped leaves right outside.

  I open the door and peer carefully out. Nothing's moving and the light is more reddish now than before.

  “You guys better be quick,” Aurora says. “Looks like the sun is setting.”

  I take off the lab coat, put the gun in my jeans pocket and step outside the tuna can. “It's not far. Ten minutes at most if we find something to carry the water in.”

  Caroline and I find Emilia's leaves right away. They're deep and have a waxy surface that should be pretty water tight. “These should hold, what? A couple of quarts each?”

  “Yep,” I nod. “Enough not to die of thirst.” But not enough to wash in, I add to myself. The jungle is hot, and I'm soaked in sweat.

  “Better not talk too much,” Caroline says. “We don't know what else lives here.”

  We walk silently through the woods, trying not to step on dry branches. We find the stream right away. The bank is muddy, but the water itself flows pretty fast and looks clean enough. A little further up the bank is sandy and looks a little like a beach, so we make our way there.

  I peer down into it. “Think there are any monsters down there?”

  Caroline scratches her chin. “I only see sand.”

  “That's what worries me. It looks too inviting. But I think I have to step into it. The water close to the bank is too shallow to fill these things.”

  I consider taking off my sneakers and my socks, but if I have to run, I'd prefer not to have to put them back on first. But I fold up my jeans as far up my calves as they will go.

  I grab one of the cone-shaped leaves, take a deep breath, close my eyes and step into the stream. The water
is cool against my calves and actually feels pretty great. Some flowers on the bank are sending a sweet fragrance my way, and with the setting sun and the balmy air the whole episode almost feels pleasant, like I'm on vacation in some tropical paradise.

  Except we witnessed at least twenty women taken by terrible not-dactyls just a couple of hours ago.

  I shudder and fill one leaf, then hand it to Caroline on the shore.

  She gives me the other one and I fill it with upstream water. Then I lean over to hand it back, and I slip on a rock under my foot and fall backwards into the stream with a huge splash.

  I splutter and cough and try to get a foothold on the bottom, but the current is pretty strong in the middle of the stream and I can't quite make it. It's deep, too. I can hear Caroline yell something from the bank, but I'm busy not drowning in this stream that suddenly turned out to flow much faster than it looked.

  Then the bottom just disappears under me and I'm sucked down a hole along with most of the water in the stream.

  I panic and try to swim up and against the current, but it's just too strong and now gravity is pulling me straight down, too.

  I'm dead. I just know it.

  Then there's another splash, I'm floating, and I realize I've fallen into a pool of some kind. I swim desperately, and this time I move the way I want to. I feel air on my face and gasp with relief, then take many panicked breaths as I keep my head above water.

  It's a cave. I can see red daylight not too far away, and the water flows lazily in that direction. I can see the rocky shore and swim towards it, then hang onto the smooth rock. I'm exhausted. Totally. The edge of the rock is a half-inch higher than the water level, but when I try to climb up, I don't even get halfway. I just don't have the energy.

  It's okay. I'll just hang here for a while and regain my strength.