Alien Caller

by Greg Curtis

  In addition if it was truly an animal he’d ringed the outside with trip wires, flood lights and sirens which should be enough to scare off any predator. And if it was a different kind of predator then at least it was enough to wake him from the soundest sleep, assuming he got any. He was as safe as any man could be.

  If only he knew what he was dealing with.

  ****************

  It wasn’t an animal. He finally accepted that the moment he saw her. But she wasn’t human or some weird experiment either. Caught by the spotlights, he could see his intruder - make that her - clearly in the white brilliance. He almost wished he couldn’t. Her very image rocked his world.

  She looked like a cross between a cougar and a woman, but a very strange one. Her body plan was nearly human having the usual two legs, two arms and a head. But the proportions were all wrong. Her body was long, her legs were short, and she seemed to be almost double jointed as her ankles appeared to work like backwards knees. Then he realized she was standing on the balls of her feet with her knees bent. It must have been a distinctly uncomfortable position.

  Her arms looked quite normally proportioned but the shining claws sticking out of the tips of her short fingers were completely wrong. Her neck was long and graceful supporting an almost elegantly elfin face. She had a pointy chin, a triangular lower jaw, large round yellow eyes, and pointed, tufted ears.

  Then there was the fur or what looked like soft, golden fluff that outlined her from head to toe. And he could see just how much of her it covered as she chose to wear a short, home spun dress only just longer than a miniskirt, and a weird vest of puffed plastic straps which covered her upper body like some bizarre form of armour.

  But it was the tool belt that truly caught his eye. Or actually what was in it. Hanging around her waist it held a variety of devices, all of which looked distinctly strange. All were metallic, though some were clearly made of darker metal than others. None of them though looked like hammers or screwdrivers. She wasn't a builder. That much he knew. They were technological. He wondered if any of them were weapons, knowing that if their positions had been reversed they surely would all have been. That tool belt was like nothing he’d ever seen.

  Probably the thing that persuaded him most however, wasn’t her appearance. It was that she looked so natural. There were none of the monstrous deformities he’d seen in the other creatures, and her movements even on the cameras had been smooth and fluid as she approached. She also didn’t seem to be misshapen. She was different yes, but not a freak.

  Perhaps the scientists had perfected their craft and developed a success. He doubted it. They were a long way from getting it right, whatever “right” was, and he wasn’t even sure they wanted to. Besides, if they’d been designing a super soldier as they usually did, she seemed to be nothing like their goal.

  As he’d watched her through the various camera feeds approaching the house, she’d shown no sign of having noticed that she was under observation. Nor did she seem to have any great strength as she crawled over objects even he with his damaged leg could hurdle. She didn’t seem to have a gun either. Not in her hands at least. And then, despite his fears, she had approached the house directly. No hiding, no stealthy approach. If she was a soldier of any type, she was forgetting all her training.

  She made a small wailing sound as she stood there, and he noticed her arm covering her eyes. The lights had blinded her as he’d intended. But perhaps they’d done more than that. It was almost as though she was in pain from them.

  “Please!” It was about the fifth time that he heard her wail that he understood she was speaking. He understood her words. She was asking for him to turn off the lights, they were hurting her as well as blinding her and in shock he almost did exactly that. But caution ruled and he held back. If she didn’t like the light she could leave. Besides, she still frightened him, the obvious animalistic nature of her form as disturbing as anything he’d ever seen.

  “Back away, I won’t hurt you.” He opened the sliding door a few millimetres and yelled it at her, suddenly understanding that it was true. She frightened him but he still didn’t want to hurt her. There was something vulnerable about her. Something more than the obvious distress she suffered from the light. Perhaps it was the fact that she was a woman and as such she appealed to the chauvinist in him. Or perhaps he’d just gone soft in his retirement.

  She did as he asked, backing up slowly, step by awkward step until she was thirty meters away, and then she stopped, unwilling or unable to go any further. Yet from where she was she had a clear path to the woods another thirty meters on either side of her, and if she turned around all the lights would then be behind her. He shouted at her again, hoping desperately she would just go and never bother him again.

  Slowly she began to do as he asked, and he watched her turning, painfully slowly, and he wondered why she took so long. Then he saw the blood and understood. She was injured. The back of one of her legs had taken a wound and the blood was trickling down. But it was the colour that was truly wrong. Trickling down her leg it was more orange more than red. Very orange.

  For the first time as he stared at her, the implications began to push their way forward. Possibilities he had never wanted to admit were forcing themselves to the front of his mind, making themselves heard, until finally a single word dominated.

  Alien.

  She couldn’t possibly be, but orange blood was something he’d never heard of in any animals. Even fish and reptiles had red blood. There was no other explanation, but it was still impossible. His thoughts ran around in chaotic circles, always returning to the same impossibility. She wasn’t human. She wasn’t animal. She wasn’t an experiment. And she wasn’t local. Not by a country mile.

  She was from somewhere else. Somewhere where the people had orange blood, and fur. Somewhere where they had strange tools and stranger clothes. Somewhere, not of Earth.

  The bizarre thing was that even though it shocked him to his core and shook his entire belief in the world, on some level it didn’t. This was the very thing he hadn’t wanted to accept. But it was also something he’d suspected. He’d almost guessed it but then denied it even to himself because it was impossible. For a while he wondered if he might be cracking up. He almost hoped so. It would be much easier to accept than the idea that there was a real live alien in his front yard.

  He would have stood there gaping and stared at her all night long too except for her next act. She fell down, face forwards, and he understood she was hurt badly. Perhaps very badly. She couldn’t walk; she might even be dying.

  “Ohh shit!” Even as he spoke he was opening the bullet-proof, bomb-proof glass sliding door and heading for her, forgetting to think again. Before his common sense returned he was within a body length of her, seeing close up what he had refused to believe before. She was truly an alien. It was in the way her prehensile tail lashed her injured leg like a tourniquet, trying to stop the bleeding. It was in the tools hanging from her belt, which whatever they might be had never been made on Earth. It was in her toe claws that shone like transparent glass. It was in the strange pattern of her fur.

  She had not come out of a lab, or at least not an Earthly one.

  “Hold still, I’m armed.” Quicker than he ever had as an agent he had his knee in the small of her back, her arms tight behind her and cuffed them. Then he remembered the toe claws and cuffed her feet even faster. Her only response was a sudden exhalation when his knee accidentally forced the air out of her lungs. Her belt came off with the snap of a buckle and he suddenly had an unarmed and defenceless prisoner.

  For a second he breathed a sigh of relief. But then came a new shock as he suddenly remembered that he had no idea what to do with her. He had captured an alien. What next?

  First aid. Years of army training once again took over as he remembered she was injured, and so he carefully inspected the wound. It was a nasty rent, half way up her inner thigh, and when he touched it he realized she still had
something embedded in it.

  With a sinking feeling he realized it had to be removed and soon. She was losing too much blood. She needed a hospital, but he knew he couldn’t bring her to one. Even if they could treat her she would be picked up in hours by the government. Meanwhile the doctors and nurse who attended her would all be picked up as well. They would not be treated well.

  From there he had absolutely no idea what would happen to her. No, actually he did have a fairly good idea and it would not be nice. The agency people weren’t nice people. They eliminated threats and she was most definitely a threat. So was anyone who knew about her and that included him. Meanwhile those lab coated respectable scientists would get their hands on her, and they were monsters in truth. What they would do to her in the name of science was unthinkable.

  There was only one option. He had to remove the object himself and patch her wound. It wasn’t as if there was a choice. She had come to him for help and he couldn’t hand her over to the authorities. It was all up to him.

  “Just relax I’m going to help you.” But there was no answer.

  He tried to help her to her feet but somewhere between her falling over and his cuffing her, she seemed to have passed out and he had to lift her. Her limp body would not help him. He could feel her pulse, rather more rapid than it should have been in a normal woman. He could hear her breathing too, and it also seemed too fast. But was that normal for her or was it because infection had set in? She didn’t respond to his words or his touch. Instead he found himself cautiously slinging the gun behind him and hoisting her as best he could like a sack of spuds.

  She was heavy. Heavier than he would have expected for her size but that was no doubt due to her musculature. Her fur made it difficult to get a good grasp on her, but once she was in his arms he suddenly appreciated what it really was. It wasn’t fur. It was much more like human hair. Very fine, very thick human hair, soft and silky, and warm to the touch. It was long down her head and the ridge running down the middle of her back, long around her wrists and ankles, and very short like velvet around her shoulders. In short it covered her like a thick fur wrap.

  He staggered the two dozen steps back to his house, surprised by the load, and limping badly, as his bad leg failed under the unexpected weight. But despite it all, he strangely still enjoyed the feel of the woman in his arms, even if she was both unconscious and alien. He had been alone too long.

  Though it was a tricky feat of coordination as he had to open the sliding door wider with his injured leg while still holding her carefully in his arms, he finally got her inside. He took her into the lounge and laid her down on the couch. He then joined her for a few seconds as he caught his breath, finding himself unexpectedly winded. Despite his regular attempts to keep fit, he guessed he was more out of shape than he had thought. Maybe his leg had limited his fitness more than he’d realised. Maybe he was just overstressed and shocked. It wasn’t important just then though and he quickly forgot about it. He could berate himself for his failings later.

  Instead he studied his prisoner as he recovered his breath, finding his first impressions had been off. She was humanly proportioned after all. She had just been walking on the balls of her feet with her knees bent, which made her appear otherwise. But it looked an uncomfortable position and he realized it was probably because of her injury. She couldn’t straighten her leg.

  Standing straight he would have guessed her height at five foot six, and she was solidly built with it, albeit in a very womanly way. Any man would have had to be blind to not notice her hour glass figure. Child bearing hips, thin waist and ample cleavage, even under her strange plastic vest and skirt she cut a womanly figure.

  The fur / hair itself was a mix. It varied in length considerably, being full length on her head and down the middle of her back while it formed a short mane around her shoulders, bracelets and anklets. But elsewhere it was shorter again, perhaps only a quarter of an inch long down the outside of her arms and legs where it formed thin lines. Elsewhere she seemed to have normal enough looking skin though tanned. In colour she was mostly a light brown with blond streaks, though it varied.

  Her face itself seemed human enough, though her nose was tiny, and her eyes large and slightly skewed. But some of the features in it were impossible. The whites of her eyes were actually yellow, but not in a way that reminded him of cats. Yellow like the sun, with gold flecks. Her teeth were white, impossibly white, and with fangs that looked like needles.

  Her irises when he checked them looking for signs of head injury, were violet. Slitted like a cat’s eyes, but not like any cat’s eyes he’d ever seen. Violet irises in yellow eyes. Not like any eyes known on Earth but at least they were of equal size and the pupils were even. She didn’t have a concussion.

  Perhaps the strangest thing was that even though she had never evolved on Earth, and even though she was obviously neither human nor any other creature he’d ever seen, she seemed remarkably normal. Strange certainly, but not so much alien as simply strange. Exotic perhaps. But she had no tentacles, no green skin or slime covered eye stalks as he had always imagined aliens would. For an alien she seemed remarkably human.

  She wore a strange mix of clothing. A short skirt, that looked distinctly homespun, filled with warm earthy tones randomly mixed up. The skirt had a sleeve in the back tailored especially for her tail. Though he'd never seen such a thing before, it made sense he supposed. Her top was some sort of plastic, or at least he knew it wasn’t fabric, and was basically a collection of straps somehow glued together to form a vest. That he guessed had never been seen before in a shop front window. It clung to her form and he could see her flesh bulging out of the thin strips between the straps. To complete the ensemble there were sandals, open toed to show off her glass claws. Glass. That concept shook him every time he saw them. How could any living creature have glass as part of them?

  Next there was the belt he’d removed. It was a tool belt made of dull material, maybe some sort of leather, though not from any cow. It was three inches wide and had a variety of holsters filled with strange looking equipment hanging off it. In a while he would examine it closely. In fact it was going to be nearly the only thing on his mind. But first he had to help his patient.

  A few more breaths and he rolled her over onto her stomach, the better to see her injury. Unfortunately the more he looked the less he liked it. It was hot to the touch, a sure sign of infection if that meant the same for her as it did for humans. Worse, the more he probed it the more he became certain that the metal inside it was barbed. It would not simply pull backwards. He had to cut it out.

  He didn’t need to look at any manual as basic medic training from nearly twenty years earlier in the army told him the procedure. He knew he had to shave the area, sterilize it, and then cut open the wound with a sterile scalpel, pull the metal barb out with tweezers, and sew the wound back together. Provided she wasn’t too alien the procedure would be simple enough. It was the other part that bothered him; the after-care, the lack of antibiotics. He couldn’t give her any drugs. Surface sterilants should be fine, he hoped, but he could give her neither antibiotics nor painkillers. What would be recommended for a human being could be lethal for her.

  Reluctant but knowing there was no choice, he began gathered the equipment, and positioned her for the operation. Carefully he lay her on her side with the good leg on top and behind. Yet even as he arranged her, he discovered an unexpected problem; her tail kept swishing around and connected directly with the affected area and every so often his face. That had never been in any of the training guides he’d read. In the end he had to tie it back to her hands still cuffed behind her back. It throbbed angrily like an angry cat’s, but it didn’t escape.

  Taking a deep breath he began shaving her inner thigh. The thin body hair came off easily enough with just a little shaving cream, and he carefully placed it in a plastic rubbish bag that he’d grabbed from the kitchen. It wasn’t just to keep his couch clean either. He didn�
��t know what he’d do with it, but he had the strange feeling it could be useful. Besides it would be evidence. Then again, he couldn’t help but notice how like human hair it felt. Could the scientists tell the difference? They could if he told them about it. But he couldn't tell them about it. Yet there was no option. It was his duty, but he didn’t want to do it. Not when he knew what they'd do to her. And maybe to him as well.