Star Travels Tales of Science Fiction

by Rhea Rose

  I wanted to chew a blade of that grass in the worst way, but I’d decided no more grass, and no more lemonade, not that there was any more lemonade. If I was going to die out here it was going to be on my terms and not theirs. I had no idea what I was dealing with here. Maybe these were the children of some cult who were breaking me down, attacking my resistance. They probably drugged the lemonade, and soon their parents would come to the field and on the pretence of rescue, take me to their home, clean me up, offer me rest, and the next thing I knew I’d be listening to their message of salvation.

  If there was poison in the lemonade, or on the grass, I certainly couldn’t tell. No bowel cramps, no vomiting. In fact, except for thirst and hunger, I felt pretty good, strong. I was ready for anything. I thought.

  My first night in the field started well. In fact, idyllic might have described it. I made myself a nest. It was warm and comfy, and the sound of crickets was full and soft but far off, not all around me as Id expected. The sky was black and filled with stars. I’d never seen so many shooting stars, not that I’d ever spent much time staring up at the night sky. I was tired, and the night cooled the earth a little, so that I was perfectly snug. Just as all the elements came together to lull me into a blissful sleep, I heard something that yanked me out of my dreamy state.

  I stayed perfectly still, but realised that the moon had come up and spotted me like an actor on a stage. I wanted to crawl into the shadows, but I dared not move.

  I heard it again.

  The soft slow slither of something heavy moving slowly through the grass, pressing down the blades as it went, captured my attention. A snake! That was my first thought. I wanted to scream. But I heard the sound again. It sounded too big to be any kind of snake that could live in this part of the world. Besides, didn’t snakes need sunlight and warmth to move about? But it wasn’t a cold evening; in fact it was downright balmy, even though it was the middle of the night. Then I heard something else. A different sound. Moaning. At first I thought it had to be the wind. But, no, it was a moan. A human moan. Someone was suffering out there somewhere in the field. The children? And then I thought about the saleslady. Had they left her lost in the field, too? She seemed so assured, so at one with the children that I was certain she had fared far better with them than I, after all they’d given her cookies! And my heart sank. I would have to look for her. Hoping it was her, and hoping it wasn’t her at the same time, I rose from my nest and took a few timid steps into the dark grass.

  I wanted to call out, but afraid to reveal myself, I stepped, then listened, stepped, then listened, and this is what I did for fifteen minutes. I didn’t hear the slithering, or the moaning, again for the rest of the night. Neither did I sleep.

  The urge to chew on the blades of grass became unbearable. I was ranting, and talking to myself. I willed myself not to chew but I wanted that grass. I was hungry. Then, I saw a small rock, dusted it and slipped the stone into my mouth. Every time the urge to chew a blade of grass swept through me, I sucked hard on the rock. I stumbled around thinking I was never going to find my way out, when I slipped and fell. Unhurt, I scrambled away from the spot and began to stomp down the grass, flattening it to get a better look at what it was I’d tripped over. My pants were damp from having rubbed up against something. Now I was desperate for a sip of water, and I hoped I’d found a small spring where the earth felt damp.

  Working hard to fell the surrounding grass, and clear away the tangle on the ground, I stopped short. The hair on my body prickled. I didn’t know what I’d found. At first I guessed an old, soggy, garbage bag; clear, yet crumpled and folded, making it difficult to see into. When I touched it I realised it wasn’t plastic, but more rubbery and jelly like. I worked at unfolding it, lifting it from the ground. The bag was terribly heavy; hard to budge. Eventually I managed to flip it over. The thing was oily and left a film all over my arms. I kicked at it with my toe, and poked up a blobby corner of the mass. From this side I could see a dark spot through the folds and I tried to get to that part of it. Bits of rock and soil embedded throughout, but the really odd thing was the lack of bugs. No worms or wood lice took refuge in the damp shade it had provided. Yet, whatever this was, I was convinced that at some point it had been living matter. It might have been the jellied carcass of a farm animal. As I examined the shiny dark mass, I noticed something moving in the bag. At first I thought it might be trapped air bubbles.

  I bent closer to inspect a discoloured section. I moved closer still, because I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. It appeared to have rusted in this spot only. And then it came together. I jerked away, but not before I again noticed the interior bubble like movement. I couldn’t stop myself. They were eyes, her eyes, and they appeared to look at me as they rolled around like loose marbles in the rivulets of disturbed moisture trapped in the tracks of the folds. I backed away. The rust spot had been her hair, and just beneath it I could make out the features of a face. Her eyes had fallen away into the sack that had once been a body. But holes gaped where the mouth had been and even a few teeth stuck out like small pebbles.

  “Hey,” I screamed up at the sky. “You kids get me out of here now!” And I ran. I tore through the grass and it tore back at me. I pulled at it with my hands and threw it down and stomped on it. “Let me out!” I spoke to the grass. For all I knew it was alive. I stopped, collected rocks, twigs, anything that would come freely from the ground and began throwing them up and out, hoping to hit something, anything, anyone. Eventually, I ran out of steam and fell down exhausted.

  I awoke to my second night.

  I was on my back staring up at the night sky sprinkled with a dusting of stars. I’d put a fist full of grass into my mouth and was chewing hard. I was afraid to look at myself. Was I already turning into a sack of fluid? And then I heard it, the slithering sound. It was definitely coming toward me. Big, heavy, and it sounded like it was on a mission! I felt like a rabbit being hunted by an unseen owl. I swear that just as it was about to make its way through the deep clump of grass separating us, I heard a calling sound, a high pitched trill. The slithering thing immediately moved off. When I no longer heard it, I relaxed, a little.

  “Why don’t you give up?” I heard a small childish voice ask. The lemonade girl. She’d never spoken to me at any time, but I just knew it had to be her.

  “Where are you?” I asked, trying to remain calm, but wanting to grab her and hold her hostage. “I’m thirsty. I want to buy more of your lemonade. Take me back to your stand.”

  Silence.

  “Please,” I said pleading. Where’s your brother? This is a good time to fish. Let’s go. I’ll take him. I’ll take you both, now,” I promised. I was panting, on the verge of tears.

  “It’s not working,” she said, sounding as if she spoke not to me but to someone close by.

  “What’s not working? I’ll help you make it work. Where are you? Come out and let me see you.” But she was gone.

  I spent another hot day in that grass and discovered that the little lemonade girl was wrong. It was working. Id given in and began to chew the grass like a deer. By late afternoon my ankles were swollen, and I could see liquid moving around inside my skin. I found a sharp twig and jabbed myself until I punctured the skin and the fluid seeped around my ankles into the ground. By evening I had a blister of fluid around my belly. But I kept puncturing myself and pressing out the fluid, which burned when it touched other parts of my flesh. Strangely, it smelled nice, like lemons! That night, sacks of fluid from my cheeks hung to my shoulders and burst when I touched them with my stone-sharpened sticks. My shoulders burned as I writhed and twisted in the grass.

  I heard the same moaning sounds as I had two nights ago. I stopped twisting and turning long enough to listen. It was me moaning. I pulled my sucking rock out of my pocket and put it back in my mouth. I didn’t want them to hear me. I didn’t want them to think they’d won.

  By now the stars, like little sparkling rocks, were back, and I waited for
the slither. I lay helpless, filling with fluid in the grass. I wondered why things had worked so quickly on the poor saleswoman and not on me, perhaps because I’d been a little suspicious of the children the whole time.

  Suddenly there was a bright flash in the sky, and a streak of light filled the air with the smell of ozone. A huge thump in the field actually lifted me off the ground. It was like a bomb going off, and it flattened some of the surrounding grass. I smelled smoke and saw a small blaze in the distance. The grass was on fire.

  I got up and hobbled in the direction of the fire. I didn’t get far. My legs were bags of fluid. I had to stop and empty them before I could continue. As I sat there pressing the juice out of my skin, the children appeared.

  “Have you come for me?” I asked, as I continued to puncture myself.

  “We have to leave,” they said in unison.

  “Leave?” I stopped what I was doing.

  “It’s time to go. They’ve started burning the fields,” the boy said.

  “And then I understood. You mean they’re burning the fields to get rid of the evidence?” They didn’t respond to that question.

  “They won’t be using this field for a while. You have to leave,” the boy said.

  “I’d love to. Show me the way.”

  The girl held her hand out to me. I let her pull me up, and the boy took my other hand.

  They led me further into the grassy land, but I was so confident that I hadn’t become what they wanted, and so tired from my ordeal, that I trusted them to lead me back to the road.

  That was another mistake.

  They began conversing in a language I wasn’t familiar with. At first I thought it might be Spanish, but I knew a little of that language and was soon convinced that it was not Spanish, but some other soft sounding Latin-based lingo. What they were doing up here in the north, in the summer, was anyone’s guess. As if he were reading my mind, the boy turned to me and said, “We’re adopted.”

  “Taken from our mothers’ bellies just before we were born,” she said.

  “Who are your parents?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  And I did.

  The children were human, at least biologically, but their adoptive parents were something else. Long limbs, with elongated heads like a fifth limb itself, they reminded me of walking stick bugs. They snacked on crickets. In fact their voracious appetite was obvious; they ate them like peanuts. But they used this place as a more sinister rest stop. They sucked on the converted self contained juices of adult humans. When they saw me, two of the aliens fell to their bellies and began slithering toward me across the flattened glade of grass. Their alien ship stood like a grass-covered hill behind them. The only hint of anything amiss was the aliens themselves, and the red glow that pulsed from within the depths of the disguised ship.

  The two adult aliens were quickly upon me. Struck with terror, I didn’t move as their thin grass like tongues whipped over my body, searching for a sweet, pulpy drink.

  “What about fishing?” I choked out. “I can still take you.” I tried to look toward the boy but I couldn’t make myself move. I was gulping breaths of air.

  The boy spoke their strange language and immediately the aliens stood up and walked away, back toward the ship, as if I’d never existed.

  “What? What did you say to them?” I asked, in a whisper.

  “I told them you were sprayed,” the boy said.

  And I wondered why he saved me. I watched as he opened his jar of crickets and released them near the aliens whose whip like tongues made the crickets disappear.

  There were a few other human children standing near the ship, and one alien stick-mother cuddled a new human baby in the joint where thorax met abdomen.

  “It’s not right,” I said, staring at the human and alien family.

  “When I come back, you can show me fishing,” the boy said, then he handed me a jar. My first thought was that he was giving me some more crickets. But when I looked I realised the jar was full of small change.

  His sister took him by the hand. “We won’t be back for quite a while,” the girl said. We don’t need this stuff. And that was that. They walked to their families, and around to the other side of the hill that was the ship.

  The explosion from lift-off knocked me to the ground. The air shimmered as a huge ball of heat moved, almost invisibly, through the sky. The only indication that anything might be there came when the ball of shimmering heat caused the stars to distort as it moved across the night sky. The grass burned in patches. Where the spaceship once sat, was a perfect circle. In moments the evidence of its presence became engulfed in a low, smoky blaze.

  I’d started to swell again and the urge to chew on the grass was nearly overwhelming. The space-craft’s take-off flattened the grass for a half mile all around. In the far distance I saw something moving steadily along the horizon. As I watched, it slowly made sense. A car.

  Hastily, I walked in the direction of the road, keeping just ahead of the flames in the burning field, stopping once to drain and bite down on a rock.

  END

  Shadow Hunter

  Light sliced through the forward quarter arc window like a geometric plane, cutting shadow into right angle. The space station was old. The duty free shop's floor and back quarter arc were slick black, as if they were permanently wet, giving the shop a retro, twentieth century feel. Old Kayden steadied himself every time he entered; afraid he'd slip on the shine and glare. The quiet rubber tip on his steel cane left foggy kisses on the glossy surface. Someone noticed them because the marks were never there the next day.

  The shop, located in the upper arc of the round, tubular station, looked out into the hole. A choice spot. They didn't give shops best locations anymore the rent was too expensive. The light-glare colliding with the floor came from the station’s hole, the center of the doughnut. These docking lights had industrial-mean intensity. Kayden wondered how anyone looking into the hole, with its migraine illumination, thought it was scenery worth paying for.

  Shadow Hunter had docked swift and neat into the hole. From inside the old ship that brought Kayden to the station, and through the ship’s stingy portal, ‘the window seat,’ he couldn't have missed the duty free shop, flagged top and bottom with light bulb signs, flashing on and off, alluding to movement. He and his baggage were only a few station days old. Every one of those days included a visit to Habitat's duty free.

  Crystal mobiles dangled over head, occasionally tinkled and zapped out shards of vibrant red and green, yellow and blue, signals from tiny galaxies. He was careful not to bump them.

  The clerk sat pale and still at a monolith desk; the desk top was the same wet black synthetic stone as the floor, and looked as if it had risen from the ground to become an arcane altar with its female devotee. The surface of the desk-counter was carefully laid out with golden offerings; ashtrays, pens, calculators, earrings.

  She sat in the center of the shop. He was at the entrance to her left. To get where he needed to go forced him to cross her path; he didn't dare go behind her, and didn't want to draw any more attention than an old recluse with a cane and outdated clothing already drew. Hairs at the back of his head stood out like beaks. He knew it, licked his hand and tried to flatten them.

  He started steadily, planting his cane, glancing casually at the conscious positioning of the items hanging on the black arc behind her. Rocks. Not just rocks. He knew a thing or two about those nondescript stones, each the size and shape of a man's lung. Each spotted and displayed for its particular irregularity and selected for its contents. Alien oysters and alien pearls, their inner ores worth far more than any slimy protein's calcified irritant.

  He passed her; she, nearly catatonic, bound in silent calculation. Tapered fingers danced across the velvet keypad as effortlessly as any blind man's. The other hand manipulated flat white sheets, paper, for authenticity. The paper rustled softly between fingers. Black hair, subtle blue highlights. And dar
k, shaded eyes framed in retro lenses gave her an intelligent look. She didn't need the eye cover. The light burning through the clear multiplex quarter arc didn't reach her. It fell onto the black floor a meter from the bottom of the glossy coffin she used for a desk.

  He passed through the channel of light. No heat, but his hazel eyes, partially lost under an awning of flesh and eyebrows, streamed. They tortured their customers this way. She could punch up filters. Kayden wiped his eyes on his sleeve.

  He nearly stumbled over a spidery wine rack.

  On the far back arc, displayed on crystal shelving, gold brackets, was a straight line of six Koalakins, like snowballs, whiter than the paper on her desk.

  He glanced at her, up to the camera at the other end, across from the entrance, glaring like the eye of God, ready to blast him at the slightest indiscretion. Old security. He wondered if it really worked.

  He picked up a Koalakin. It was tiny, fitted easily into the palm of his dry hand. There wasn't much to the creature, lots of wispy fur that hid its shape. Round head, no ears, slight protuberance for a nose, two, black, pinhead dots at the front of its head for eyes. Four legs, black claws, a round, ball body. If he blew on it, the bear like toy might float away.

  His thumb worked through the fur on its belly and exposed a pimply button that he pushed. The Koalakin trembled slightly then came to life, black claws scrambling, unable to grip his tough flesh. The creature waddled to the tip of his finger, chewed on an even tougher nail.

  Kayden smiled.

  With his thumb he tried nudging the creature back into his palm. It flipped backward, righted itself on his wrist and slipped up his sleeve. He put his hand in his pocket and shook his arm, felt the Koalakin tumble down into the lining. He fumbled, feeling for the button, hoping to turn it off. He found the nodule, touched it and a tiny, muffled mewing began. He touched the button again and everything stopped.