CHAPTER 8

 

TARA

 

The Mutant is making woeful noises.  Unless I’m mistaken, he seems to be cussing himself out good.

I mean, I don’t know for sure.  Because we can’t understand each other.  At all.

But I think so.

With my body gently swaying into his with every metronomic leap he makes, I accept that I don’t know how to get home.  I accept that in here, in this ship seems a lot safer than out of it.  I accept that at this time, I don’t know how to tell him what I need.  He doesn’t seem to be a mean alien, but I’m still without a way to explain that I need to get home.

I cover my mouth as I think of my coworker, who is raising her granddaughter because of a military deployment schedule change.  The baby’s mother had to serve overseas and has been gone nearly a year.  My coworker said her daughter has really struggled, but she… she said she’s had to deal.

I’m going to have to deal too.  Losing my mind won’t help me get back to them: I need to set aside my panic—set my worries for them aside—until I can figure something out, some way to get back.

I know this.  I still start to cry.

And this breaks Mutant and he really starts to make noises.  He even stops jumping—my body jostling into his front with a little more force on his last two hops.  When he’s managed a complete stop, he sets me down to examine me.  I try to tell him I’m unhurt but he even wants to spin me around and I have a fair idea I know what he’s thinking he should check over.  I try to gently knock his hands back but you’d think I went after him with a baseball bat with the way he retreats, ducking his head.  When I unconsciously rub a hand over my butt, he hisses a distressed sounding noise and in a strangely punishing-looking move, he slaps his hand over his injured shoulder and squeezes down on it.

I yelp, “Don’t do that!”

It startles him enough to make him drop his hand, at least.  But he's still making that noise.

“Quit that.  I'm fine, okay?”  I point to my butt then make a ‘forgetta bout it’ motion with my hands.

I can’t even guess what he thinks my gesture meant but it must be close to “You beat me so hard my ass is broken,” because he has a meltdown and, chirping in alarm now, he goes for his shoulder again.

“What are you, the alien version of a house elf?”  I say and sharply tug at his elbow until he stops hurting himself.  “Enough!”

When he still doesn’t make a move towards me to pick me back up, I—feeling more than a little incredulous—slowly step in his direction, and watch his eyes dart up to mine before they guiltily flash away again.

For some reason, this makes me lose almost all of my fear of him.  Maybe it’s the super submissive behavior, or the fact that he seems to feel pretty bad for smacking me on the rear back there, but… he really doesn’t seem so bad.

And… I’m starting to rethink the Mutant label.  He’s too… it doesn’t fit him.

I look him over critically, and when he catches me doing this, brightly colored spots blotch his cheekbones before disappearing just as quickly as they appeared.

He brings a hand up to his chest and scratches at the slight dip between some seriously chiseled pecs.  When he drops his hand again, it draws my eye down to his lower half being so… different.  It looks like he’s been spliced: man up top, kangaroo on the bottom.  More like a Centaur Kangaroo.  Compared to the other aliens?  I shrug.  At least this one’s cute.

“Centaur Kangaroo, Kangaroo Centaur.  You’re a Kentaur—ha.  I like that better,” I say out loud.

This guy makes chuckling, cackling, snickering sounds that remind me of a Kookaburra bird—he also croaks.  This is the sound he makes now, a chirping-croak, continuing to look miserable because although I like his new nickname better, apparently he doesn’t like anything better at the moment.

I sigh in exasperation.  “Stop wallowing!  I told you: I’m not hurt.”

When I walk to his arm this time, he hesitates only a moment before he carefully—so, so carefully—picks me up like my butt was burned, not tapped.  I hiccup a laugh at the image, but this only serves to panic him a little more.

“Sorry,” I try to tell him, but he doesn’t stop looking worried.

Sheesh.  Guess from here-on-out, I need to try to keep to an even keel.  Because right now, I think I’m scaring this alien.  Me.  Scaring an alien.

Weird.  So weird.

I need to get home so bad.  This could still be a dream.

Please just be a weird dream.

I’m aware this is no dream.  I don’t want to hear it.  I don’t want to be rational.  Rational has no place on a spaceship when my children are separated from me—

So much for controlling those messy emotions.

Because now I’m crying again, and my sobbing does nothing to ease his apparent feelings of alienshame and alienguilt.  He starts a teeth-clacking noise.

It’s a distressed sound and it fits my mood so I don’t try to stop him this time.

And when we reach the floor where I originally made my escape from him?  He stops dead, making me bang against his torso with his aborted hop-skid motion.  He stops dead, because in front of us is a giant—and I mean giant alien, with a burnt-sunset color to his scales and bright warning slashes of white color cutting through all the rusty orange-brown.

This one has huge horns, and he’s bent over, the tip of one horn extending so far out that it traces along the floor as he moves, as he sniffs along… the wall.  Smelling a wall?

See what happens when you live in space?  Scary space suits and weird bird calls and wall smelling—I’m ready to go home!  I don’t want to end up like this!

And I could be mistaken but… isn’t that basically the spot I’d been doing my Ace Ventura’s Mission Impossible impression when I hugged my back to it and tried to sneak away?

The alien in front of us inhales hard—and then he rises up sharply, making those huge horns dent one side of this spaceship hallway we’re in.

His head is even more striking than his body: with sort of a darker masking on his face, broken by slashes of white patterning on either side of his nose.

It’s intense.

It looks scary.

He looks scary.  A lot scary.  He’s also basically the size of a small Humvee.  (Not really. But kind of.)

And he’s looking right at me.