The Dry Earth (Book 1): The Phone

by Orion, W. J.

  They ran for a few seconds, leaping over fallen, petrified trees, broken vehicles, and the detritus of a society overrun by invasion. Yasmine slid onto the ground behind a fallen oak tree twenty yards from the front of the green and yellow home. She pointed her pistol over the top of the log at the cracked green paint of the worn front door. She held the camera on her mom’s phone up in the same fashion.

  Knox ran past Yasmine’s place of hiding and sprinted across the yard of the house. She was heading to take cover behind a wrecked motorcycle leaning against the curb. She didn’t get there in time.

  The front door of the home disappeared in a smashing blast as the evil crab’s plasma weapon discharged on the inside. The blue-white beam lanced across the yard, cutting a furrow in the pavement walkway that headed to the street as shards of burning wood flew in every direction. The beam met Knox’s leg at the knee and cut the limb clean off. Yasmine caught it all on shaky video.

  “Arrrgh!” she screamed as she tried to step on the severed leg and instead crashed down into the grass, face first. “Ahhh!”

  “KNOX!” Yasmine screamed as her friend fought to roll over, fought to free the pump shotgun that might give her a chance at living for longer than another second.

  The crab launched into the barren dirt yard, its facial tentacles writhing in fury as the tip of its plasma cannon grew brighter for another shot. It turned its attention to Yasmine and the log she hid behind. Its faceplate snapped open, revealing the same cold, red eye she saw in the depths of the high school. The unblinking, hateful orb stared at her again. The blinking red record light flashed on the screen of her mom’s phone like a tiny twin to the crab’s eye.

  You.

  The monster’s tentacles slowed, and rubbed against each other like a grubby beast about to devour a wounded meal. It had found her. Victory and vengeance belonged to it.

  Yasmine pulled the trigger of her small pistol.

  The bullet went wide, hitting the house behind the crab. Its effect was… unexpected.

  Instead of a wooden smack the bullet’s strike erupted into a ball of green flame that disintegrated a rough circle in the siding big enough to throw a basketball through. It sizzled and crackled, half made of electricity, and half acid. Trader Joe had done her a solid.

  Knox’s shotgun boomed from the ground nearby and the head of the crab kicked sideways just as the plasma cannon went off. Yasmine’s hair blasted away from her face as the eruption passed overhead. Behind her the energy destroyed street and ground, but thankfully not her. Now she owed Knox a life debt.

  The crab stomped its menacing alien feet towards the wounded Knox—shaking the hard ground—as its weapon powered up again. It reared up to trample the screaming woman as she unloaded shell after ineffective shell into its armored underbelly. She cried from the pain of her severed leg but refused to give up. The monster turned back to face Yasmine, and let its weight drop on top of Knox’s body.

  Yasmine pulled the trigger again and again, feeling the unfamiliar buck of the pistol’s recoil as if though someone else was holding the gun and shooting, not her. She didn’t do this; she didn’t get into gunfights with aliens. She didn’t take crazy risks. She was smarter. She picked her fights.

  She picked this fight.

  The strange bullets Trader Joe gave her hit the armor of her crab nemesis in the belly hatch where the cockpit loaded in. She could see the square-ish seam and somehow kept the rounds impact on it, or near it. Each bullet struck the black and red armor and cooked it away, hissing and crackling like the house before, eating through the biomechanical shell as if it were paper run under water. The holes grew and grew and in her head—somehow—she could hear a thousand screams just under the surface of reality as the translucent cockpit was breached, and the life-giving fluid inside spilled.

  The weight of the monster fell on Knox, but it remained still. Several of the tiny, blue and purple squid bodies of her nemesis fell to the ground, twitching.

  “KNOX!” Yasmine screamed and got to her feet. She dropped the phone and it came to a rest tilted up, almost pointed at the front of the home. She gave up on recording the event; she had to rescue her friends.

  She tucked the pistol in her pants pocket and sprinted to the melting crab atop her friend. She dropped down on her knees at Knox’s side and cradled her friend’s head. Inches away was the glass red eye of the monster. Its light faded and dulled as the power from its living entities at its core died out.

  “I’m okay. I won’t dance much anymore,” Knox said, and coughed hard. “It hurts real bad.” Tears of pain ran down her face.

  “You’re not being crushed?”

  “I mean a little, but pull my arms. I promise not to fart,” she said, and lifted her hands up for help. Just as Yasmine got up to pull her friend, Caleb arrived, huffing and puffing.

  “Let me. Run into a house on fire. It runs in the family. Go find your fish tank,” he said, grabbing Knox’s arms at the wrist.

  “Okay,” Yasmine said, and ran towards the hole ringed in fire that once had a door.

  As she ran she heard and felt a tremendous explosion from outside of Shant’s walls.

  The alien vessel died along with its pilot.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  I Never Turn Around

  Caleb’s weapon had started a fire that devoured the house.

  Trey’s high-tech crab chassis leaned against the side of the stairs in a thin puddle of whatever fluid was inside the center cockpit. He had been skewered by a bolt of energy from the top, nearly splitting the torso of the armor in half. The white shell was scorched and burnt where the energy struck it.

  “Trey! Trey!” she yelled as she grunted against the weight of his chassis. She couldn’t move it. The weight was too enormous. She stood tall and peered down into the gaping hole in his back.

  The translucent alien musculature inside the armor she’d seen before had been burnt and torn into frayed strings by the attack. The limp cords of synthetic organics flopped to the side as she dug down to reach the core where Trey’s 333 bodies were dying. After a few frantic seconds her fingers brushed against the cracked, clear surface beside the socket the cockpit plugged into.

  The tank was mostly empty, leaving all of his tiny little bodies to writhe in too little life sustaining fluid. Like worms left in the sun his bodies wriggled their last moments away.

  Get his bodies out and to water as fast as you can, the visitor in her head said. He has minutes before he will be gone. As do you.

  She tried to tear his containment tank out but it wouldn’t budge. The socket was still attached, and the clear substance wasn’t glass; it was far harder. Yasmine needed something to transport him in. She stood and bolted to the kitchen that was on fire. The heat made her face hurt, but she pushed through the fire and smoke to the open fridge.

  Sitting on a wire shelf inside the smoking appliance was an orange plastic bowl that once held food. She grabbed it, and the hot plastic bent in her fingers like the old ocean-side taffy her mother told her about. She ignored the newest pain of the day and ran back to the fallen crab, climbing atop it like a sawhorse.

  Reaching in over and over she jammed her hand into the hole, scooping out his little tentacle bodies and dropping them into the dry bowl with wet plops. Every time she pushed her hand into the broken case keeping his bodies contained she cut deep scratches into her skin, rupturing some of the blisters she’d gotten earlier. With the fire at her back and the stinging lacerations on her arms, she was enveloped in pain.

  And she didn’t stop.

  She wouldn’t stop.

  Yasmine kept digging his bodies out until only a few remained and then—without any notice—she was picked up and carried away by her uncle. One hand under each armpit he scooped her up and held her against his chest.

  “Nooo! There are more of him!” she screamed over the growing roar of flames eating the rear of the house apart.

  “You have enough!” her uncle hollered in her ear
as he continued carrying her out the burning frame of the front door. He carried her around the crab they killed, and to the street where he’d already dragged the now one-legged Knox. She had made it to the motorcycle after all, though now she was plus a tourniquet, and minus a leg. He set Yasmine down, and without any hesitation, she took off.

  Yasmine pushed, running with every ounce of the remaining strength she had towards the solar still near the center of Shant. She passed her mom’s phone where it lay recording, then the bodies of the fallen, the ruined houses, the torn fabric, and the parking garage and arrived at the old park that had been repurposed into Shant’s water reclamation facility.

  Yasmine slid down the slope of a solar still marked as fresh water until her feet blasted through the clear plastic they used to catch the evaporation. Her feet plunged into the warm water until it met her knees. In a single motion she upended the gelatinous orange bowl and dumped all of Trey’s bodies into the water. She stood, chest heaving, staring down at the hundreds of little squid bodies that constituted her alien friend.

  They floated, unmoving.

  “Trey, come on. Come on. Swim. Drink, breathe, whatever you gotta do,” she pleaded. She reached into the water—the coolness helped her burnt and scratched limbs—and swirled her hands around the floating alien bodies. She touched him. His little bodies were thin, almost emaciated and felt slippery smooth to the touch. He was soft, and pleasant to touch.

  One flipped over, and swished itself around, darting between her spread fingers. She smiled and laughed as another did, then another. In seconds it was ten swimmers, then twenty, then fifty. Too many to count were moving then, sluggish at first then rapidly, rejuvenated.

  “Trey!” she exulted, splashing the water with glee.

  His bodies circled her, floating up and down in a streaming ring of multiple elevations like a carnival ride she’d never have the pleasure of enjoying.

  “Great success,” a man’s voice said over her shoulder.

  Yasmine spun and looked up at the new arrival. Taller than ever, Trader Joe stood and watched, wrapped head to toe in his fabric coverings.

  “Thanks for those bullets,” she said, grinning. “Should I ask how you made them?”

  He inclined his head, dismissing her thanks. “I could explain it to you, but it would be a long conversation. The technology of my people is… hard to translate.”

  “So you’re not a human then?”

  “Hardly, though I have gotten quite good at pretending to be one,” he answered.

  “I think I knew all along. I don’t know, but I think I knew. How did we do?” she asked him. “The crabs are dead, the ship is blown up, how many people survived?”

  “Most. I just brought the news to the people in the shelter. They’ll be here to thank you in short order.”

  Trey’s tiny bodies pushed against the back of her knees. She looked down at him and could read the behavior for what it was; fear.

  “It’s okay, Trey. This is Trader Joe. He’s a friend of mine.”

  “He’s afraid of me,” Trader Joe said. “My kind have a tumultuous history with the crabs.” He crouched and looked into the water at Trey. “Do not fear, friend of mine. I am unable to spread the infection as many of my people are. I hold no malice towards you.”

  When he stood, Yasmine felt Trey’s bodies loosen, and spill out around her. He seemed satisfied by Trader Joe’s short speech. She reached down and swirled her hands in the water, touching the tiny bodies swimming in the water. It made her heart skip to be touching him, even if he was a school of squids swimming in a submerged barrel in the dirt.

  “Would you like to talk to him?” Trader Joe asked her. “I can form a conduit between you.”

  “Yes, please,” she said with a hopeful smile.

  A moment later she heard an echo of a far-off voice, then a sound that reminded her of shoes tapping towards her down a hall.

  Yasmine? a young male voice called out.

  Trey?

  It’s me. Imagine that, us talking like proper people.

  She burst out in tears of happiness. He sounded just like she hoped he would. Imagine that. I’m so glad you’re alive. I want to talk to you forever. I can’t even believe this is happening.

  Me either. Thank you for saving my life, Trey said.

  Thank you for saving mine. And for the medicine we got for Shant, and for… giving me the courage to do this.

  Nonsense. You’re as much my inspiration as I am yours. I’m glad we took the fight to them. Long overdue.

  We’re not done, you know. I’m gonna hunt these things down. Every last one of them until they realize Earth isn’t safe anymore.

  It’s pointless unless you can get to the fleet, Trey said.

  What’s in the fleet?

  For starters, the core populations of most of my kind. And just as important… the water we stole from you.

  The water? We could bring it back? Save the planet?

  Theoretically. You can’t imagine how much fighting you’d have to do, to do it.

  How do I get to the fleet? How do I get our water back? How do I end this war?

  How do WE end this war, you mean? Trey teased.

  WE, was implied. So you’re going to help me?

  Of course I will. I have to. The resistance I’m a part of will help too. My kind needs to stop our ways, and do it now. Live within our means without stealing the lives of a hundred other species on a hundred other worlds. Your people, with my people… we might be able to do it.

  You have my aid as well, Trader Joe added to the conversation. “My species will be very interested in a chance to settle the score against the crabs and their colonial ways.

  There’s a small resistance cell north of here that has a ship. We can get off world and figure out the next step.

  Excellent, Yasmine thought. I’ve always thought the stars were pretty.

  They are, both Trader Joe and Trey said.

  Aren’t you afraid? Trey asked her. Leaving Earth?

  Oh I’m afraid. The difference is, when others are afraid, they turn around.

  I never turn around.

  About the Author

  W.J. Orion is the pen name of someone else, who you may or may not care about digging up the identity of. He really does have a daughter named Willow, as well as another daughter named Juniper, and a wife, and a dog too.

  They live in New Hampshire near the river, and are enjoying all that life has to offer.

  You can follow him on Facebook at facebook.com/WJOrion (as well as sign up for his newsletter too) and he's on Twitter too: @orion_wj

  The Dry Earth Book One: The Phone

  Copyright © 2019 W.J. Orion

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the author. Your support of author’s rights is appreciated.

  Published in the United States of America

  First Publishing Date 2019

  All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover illustration by Ella Rossi

  Cover and interior layout by Alan MacRaffen

  Dedication

  The Phone is for my daughter Willow. You are almost three years old now, and in just those few months you’ve taught me more about being a good man than I thought was possible.

  I’m so excited to watch you grow up, and be brave, and courageous, and funny, and silly, and kind.

  Fierce too.

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