“Come back! Bernard! Please come back!”
Jez had managed to free her cousin. At Toby’s insistence, she had used Bernard’s hunting knife to cut one of the cables, causing the whole creature to collapse, ending the nightmare. Sam had shot it several times, although the effect had been negligible, serving only to distract it from tormenting Loren.
Bernard began breathing immediately, hacking and coughing as the cables slackened and she was able to pull them off his chest. His skin was a pale, bluish color, and a distant, glazed look filled his bloodshot eyes. If only he would say something!
Sam had asked Saara and Mireia to go rescue the Drorgs, so it was just the two of them, and she was barely doing anything to help Loren, after loosening the cables holding his body. Instead, she was bent over the dino-like corpse monster.
“I can’t help both boys at one time,” Jez called out.
Sam had a phone in one hand. Jez wasn’t sure if it was a cellular or satellite phone; but either way, it was amazing that Sam had a signal.
“Hello? Yes, I—Ted, please, not now. I need Forensics and Combat out here. No, no immediate threat. Send a Tracker. Preferably one that can fly. Yes, I still think you’re lame. Put me through to Julie.”
Jez stood, reluctantly leaving her cousin’s side, and walked over to Loren. Sam had ungagged him, but left him lying there, staring at the ceiling, panting and wide-eyed.
“Hey.” She snapped her fingers, getting his attention. “Can you move?”
He didn’t seem to hear her at first. Then he grimaced, and whispered, “Not really.”
Sam was still on the phone. “Julie. I found Aitana. What’s left of her. The rest is some kind of assemblage. Mostly found objects woven into continuous lines. I’m saving a sample. Danny will take care of it. The team is fine—”
“This is fine?!” Jez shouted.
Sam straightened, moving away from her. “I’ll have them rendezvous with Danny as soon as possible. Can you have a medic on site? That will be perfect. Sam, out.”
She sighed, lowering the phone, and looked at Jez. “I hate that woman enough without having you yell over me. Yes, everyone is alive and recoverable, except for my poor neighbor, here.” She gestured at the corpse-thing.
“Your . . . neighbor?”
“Danny and I live in a private community along with many other agents. A few weeks ago, Aitana and her husband Jonás went missing while on duty in Mallorca. Danny went out there looking for them, and Zirol injured him badly. Thankfully, an old friend of mine was there to help him. Jonás turned up in pieces this morning at MHQ, in a package addressed to Julie. We know they were both Noasaurs[1], which is rare among us and even moreso in your fossil record, but I’d know those teeth anywhere. . . . This is her. This is—was—Aitana. It will be up to her supervisor to track down any remaining family so she can be laid to rest properly. That’s of course if she hasn’t broken contact.”
She didn’t just look upset. She looked ill.
Bernard groaned, “We need to get the fuck outta here.”
Jez and Sam both looked around at the sound of his voice, hoarse and quiet between coughing fits. He’d drawn himself into a sitting position.
“That thing is still out there,” he said. “Zirol is still out there.”
Sam nodded, understanding, and looked to Jez. “Help him get to the car. I’ll take care of Loren. He’s not going to heal properly until he eats. Head due south and you should be able to find something in Marion. Keep a phone on hand and wait for further instructions. I’ll send the Drorgs your way as soon as possible, and they’ll take you to Danny.”
Bernard was stubborn as ever, and insisted on moving without Jez’s help. Loren, on the other hand, was nearly unresponsive. Sam drew him up, until he sat staring into space wide-eyed and detached.
She spoke to him in Moehni, slowly gaining his attention until he finally responded. Then she said in English, “We’ve got to get you into the car before the enemy comes back.”
“You mean Zirol,” Loren said quietly.
She looked over at Bernard and back and Loren. “Are you boys sure?”
“Was him the other night, too,” Loren confirmed. “Beaufort. Been watching me.”
Sam tensed, but gave no other outward reaction as she said, “Then it’s a good thing we’re getting you out of here.”
He stared down at the floor in front of him. “My legs hurt. Arms hurt. Pretty sure I’ve pissed myself.”
“At least you can feel your body.”
“Feels like shit. Got a change of clothes in the car.”
Jez glanced between Loren and her bullheaded cousin, who was already at the door, and said, “Wait here. I’ll take care of it.”
Bernard stumbled down the slope towards the car, where Jez guided him sternly into the passenger seat. She took Loren’s clothes and a plastic bag back up to the house to help Sam, and by the time she and Sam got back to the car with Loren, Bernard had moved to the driver’s side and started the engine. He wouldn’t be moved, and he was too big for Jez to manhandle.
“I know where we’re going,” he said, “And I want to get there as soon as possible. If I don’t think I can make it, I promise I’ll pull over and switch with you.”
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
She didn’t trust him to do that, but he wasn’t leaving her with a choice. She got in the passenger seat, and was privately glad that he was the one maneuvering the car back down the steep driveway.
* * * * *
It was with a tinge of guilt that Bernard was so eager to put the beauty of the Blue Ridge Parkway behind him. A glance in his rearview was all he needed to encourage him, though. Hollow-eyed, with an unnervingly sickly pallor, Loren gazed silently, miserably, out the window. His chest heaved with every wheezing breath.
“This ain’t like you, man. You wanna talk about it?” Bernard asked, hoping to lighten the mood.
“No.”
“We’ll be in Marion before you know it. Sam’s right. Food’ll have you back to normal in no time.”
“Might just make me sick.”
“You’ll be fine.” The statement was closer to wishful thinking than any form of assurance.
Silence followed. The trees continued to roll by. Bernard struggled to maintain his speed around the tight mountain curves without throwing them off the side.
“I’m sorry.”
Loren’s voice creaked quietly from the back seat, nearly lost in the rumbling of his car as it careened through the switchbacks.
Bernard and Jez exchanged glances at the unexpected apology, and he asked, “Um . . . for what?”
“You shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t know what I was thinking, coming to Earth. I don’t belong here. This. . . ,” Loren’s voice broke. He sniffed and said, “This body is killing me. If Zirol doesn’t kill me—kill us all—first. And . . . and I don’t want to die. I’m too young for this. Saara’s right. I’m too young to die.”
“No, no, you don’t understand. I feel trapped in this body. Like it’s eating itself inside out and I’m just wearing it while it slowly kills me. I. . . .”
He broke. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he wept. “I’m sorry. . . . I . . . I’m so sorry. I can’t do this. I don’t wanna do this anymore. I wanna go home.”
“Loren,” Jez began cautiously, “How old are you? Really?”
At first Bernard wasn’t sure he heard Loren correctly.
Jez said, “Well, sixteen’s not bad. I’m sixtee—”
“I said six.”
She spun around in her seat. “Are you for real?”
Bernard nearly turned around, himself, and barely kept the car on the road. “Are you serious? My baby sister is older than you!”
“I know that!” Loren croaked, “I’m very aware, thank you! But I’ve been doin’ this my whole life. Since I was old enough to leave my parent’s den—barely two, by your count. I thought I could make a difference. Get 'em a better home and find medical help for my sister. Stand up to a cultural system that forgets small folk like us exist unless it’s convenient to remember us. They laughed the day I walked into that office, wanting to be an agent, and I knew the worst thing I could do was to back down. But what good is this going to do if it fucking kills me? I . . . this . . . my body feels like a shell, right now. Like a great, big, heavy shell. It’s so . . . empty. And now it hurts. And the whole time all of that was going on back there, I thought . . . for the first time in days, I felt like I was back in my own body. Just a tiny little stringy, pathetic . . . worthless excuse for a Ryozae . . . trapped inside the useless body of another species . . . finding out that he’s being hunted like his ancestors for fun. The word he used, ‘Springer,’ is an archaic slur for small prey. All that training so my instincts can take over and turn me into a fucking animal in the face of my own mortality.”
“You’re not worthless,” Bernard said. He wasn’t sure what to say, but he couldn’t let Loren continue down a depressive spiral like this.
“Then what am I worth? I can’t do anything.”
Bernard pointed at the glove compartment, “Jez, there’s five granola bars and a bottle of water in there. Would you help him?” Then he sighed, contemplating the road while she handed Loren the whole set of granola bars and the water. He took them eagerly, while Bernard said, “Loren, I’m seventeen and until last weekend my greatest accomplishments included book reports, science fair projects, and that time I caught a tarpon on a fishing trip with Drestan. Since then, I’ve learned that my greatest achievements include getting my ass beat by mutant space monsters and making friends with every sentient being that hasn’t tried to kill me. As someone who has no idea what the fuck we’ve gotten ourselves into, I don’t think anyone is suited to get involved with this case, except maybe Sam and the Drorgs. But you say they’ve got the whole Agency on board with this thing. People are losing their lives. So I wouldn’t go judging my worth—or yours—based on what just happened back there. You’ve accomplished more than you think you have. I can’t even begin to imagine what you went through just to be here.”
“But what if it’s all for nothing?”
Jez turned in her seat again. “Standing up for yourself when everyone else is willing to leave you behind is never ‘for nothing.’ Especially when they’re all gigantor-sized and you’re, like, smaller than a backpack.”
Loren sniffed again, but this time he sounded more embarrassed and humored than scared when he said, “Yeah. I guess. But . . . please don’t tell Saara I said that. She takes it personally and she gets really upset. It’s kind of exhausting to argue about with someone who’s as big as she is.”
Bernard glanced back in the mirror, raising a brow. “Is there anything you two don’t argue about?”
A tiny smile played across Loren’s features. “No, but most of it’s really just in fun. We have very different experiences of Ryozae culture, though, and she doesn’t want to believe that her own could possibly be wrong. She doesn’t understand that despite everything she’s been through, she has an inherently privileged position in most situations. It’s a universal truth that our cultures—and even our languages—favor the Aemarrim. All but the very smallest and largest of them have always set the standard. They’re faster in every way, they typically flock together, and we couldn’t even survive as a common whole if they hadn’t agreed not to hunt the rest of us in the first place. Saara’s so used to things being a way that works for her that she can’t imagine why it wouldn’t work for someone else. How or why she manages to understand that with human cultures when she can’t do the same with her own is beyond me.”
Jez suggested, “Maybe because human cultures are outside her natural experience, and not her own.”
Loren’s expression changed to something more thoughtful, and he said, “You know? I hadn't thought of that. And it’s not as though she’s never struggled—don’t get me wrong. She has. I know she has. But I wish she’d understand that she’s doing the same thing to others that’s been done to her.” He shrugged. “But remember what I said about flocking together. Remember that any time you deal with our people. Especially the Aemarrim.”
Bernard gazed back at the road as he said, “They find safety in numbers, but it turns into an echo chamber. If you want to change one mind, you have to change the pack mind.”
“You catch on fast,” Loren said. “It’s sorta scary.”
Bernard shrugged. “Apparently I don’t have a choice.”
Loren shook his head. “You have a talent for it. Just don’t get cocky about it, okay?”
“I’ve never really been—”
Jez cut him off, “What he means is don’t be reckless, Bernie. You know exactly what I mean. Don’t go jumping into shit and saying things you’re going to regret later.”
Loren’s eyes widened, as she appeared to suggest something he hadn’t considered. “Yes. If that’s a habit of yours, please don’t do that.”
“I’ll do the best I can.” Bernard promised. “That’s all we can do, right?”
Loren looked down at his lap. “If all I can do is cry and eat granola bars, I’m not going to survive this.”
“You’re in the back seat of a car in the middle of nowhere and you need a doctor. No one expects anything of you in that position, and that’s okay. The only thing I can do right now is keep this car on the road. Enjoy the snack. We’ll worry about the rest later.”
Loren went quiet, then muttered softly, “Sure thing. . . . Thanks.” He didn’t speak again until they started to see signs of civilization, and talked about nothing but chicken nuggets until they found a drive through.
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[1] Masiakasaurus knopfleri, 2001