Jayla awoke to the smell of cooking food. The Fifth Under Captain brought her something warm in a cup. She smelled it. It wasn’t heavily spiced like the rest of the alien meal, so she sipped it. It tasted bland, but she smiled and thanked him. She drank the liquid slowly.
When she finished, he brought her more, sitting in the chair next to hers with his own cup. He mimed drinking.
“Skeleton,” he pronounced slowly, putting his fingers around her wrist again. She laughed a little and drank.
“You should learn English,” Jayla said. He shrugged.
The Over Sergeant came over eating something that looked like bacon but smelled like habanero. The scent alone made Jayla’s eyes water and chest burn.
“We are going to get your food today,” he said.
Jayla nodded.
“Can you show me where?”
He held his tablet out to her. Most of the symbols were unreadable, but English words dotted the map on it. She looked for the town near the cabin, but she couldn’t find it.
“Where did you find me?” she asked. The alien pointed the spot out to her. She traced her path backward, north of the abandoned town with the hospital and back up the roads she remembered.
“Somewhere around here,” she said.
“Good,” the Over Sergeant said.
“Good,” the Fifth Under Captain added. He yelled in his language and men started cleaning up.
It took hours to find the cabins. Jayla sat in the copilot seat and tried to navigate. The Over Sergeant sat behind her and translated for both the pilot and the Under Captain, who sat behind the pilot.
Eventually, she recognized the lake where she had left the old man’s car. The car still sat in the adjacent parking lot.
The Hrwang vehicle landed on the road in front of her Daddy’s cabin and the men followed Jayla.
“We should watch for wild animals,” she suggested, and some of the men pulled weapons out after the Over Sergeant translated. The guns they held were odd; small weapons that looked like toys. Jayla only had vague memories of her rescue, but those memories reminded her the weapons were deadly despite their appearance.
The cabin had remained untouched since she had left it, but she belatedly remembered she’d left her keys in the SUV.
“We can break a window,” she said, but the Over Sergeant shook his head and one of the aliens produced a metal box that he put up to the lock. It buzzed and clicked and the lock opened.
“Fancy,” she said.
“Fancy,” the Under Captain repeated.
They cleaned out the food from the cabin that Jayla had left the first time. Hungry for real food, not alien spiced food, Jayla ate several soft cereal bars. Her teeth still hurt, but the soft, sweet goo tasted good.
She found a bag of Oreos in the back of the pantry.
“I wish we had milk.”
The men grinned at her as she showed them how to twist the cookies apart and lick the filling. Some made jokes that she didn’t understand until the Under Captain quieted them, but they all copied her example.
“We could stay here, you know,” Jayla said wistfully. “It’s a nice cabin. I’m sure there’re others your men could use.”
“It is not our patrol area,” the Over Sergeant replied before translating. The Fifth Under Captain put his arm around Jayla and gave her a gentle hug.
They visited cabin after cabin, scrounging what food they could. After visiting twenty or so, they only found enough food to last them three or four days.
Jayla spent the night in her own bed at her father’s cabin. The Fifth Under Captain and the Over Sergeant slept in the living room, and the other men scattered around, some inside, some outside, like they normally camped.
Jayla slept little that night, wondering what she was doing. Should she have gone with her sister? Doubts plagued her.
The familiarity of the cabin made her miss her father also. She knew he was dead. He’d seen this coming, which is why he’d sent his two girls up here when he went East. He’d have contacted her if he could, she thought.
The aliens could fly anywhere. Could they fly to where he was, if he wasn’t dead?
She thought about asking them to take her to her summer home in Boise, but she knew no one would be there. Her father had gone East. Things had fallen apart quickly after that. He couldn’t have made it back.
Should she check anyway?
Morning came and Jayla must have slept. Her muscles were sore and she was hungry again. She ignored the food the soldiers cooked and grabbed more cereal bars. The Over Sergeant said she could have all she wanted; they were too sweet for the Malakshians.
They continued raiding cabins, Jayla pointing them out from memory, until they landed at a cabin with a barn shaped, stand-alone garage.
“No, no, no, no,” she cried when she recognized it. “No!”
The men with her looked confused.
“Leave now! It’s dangerous.”
The Over Sergeant translated.
The Fifth Under Captain’s demeanor changed. He looked suddenly like a soldier, an officer, barking commands, ordering Jayla to stay on board with the pilots. The pilot entered coordinates into his tablet and set it into a receptacle, the copilot armed himself and waited by the hatch. The other soldiers, all armed, moved out of the vehicle and began fanning out around the cabin and garage, covering each other, prepared for anything.
Jayla pictured over and over again the old man coming out of the cabin with his shotgun and she just knew he was going to come out and kill her captain, just like he’d killed something inside of her sister.
“No!” she wanted to scream at the men. Run away! There’s no reason to fight. There’s no reason to put yourselves at risk. He’s a monster. He’s too dangerous.
Men went into the barn.
It felt like hours, but only minutes had passed when the Over Sergeant and the Under Captain returned to the ship. They moved to sit next to Jayla.
The Over Sergeant spoke solemnly.
“We found a dead body. Tied up.”
“Is it him?”
“Who?”
The Under Captain asked something.
“Tell us what happened.”
Everything spilled out. Jayla spoke rapidly, the Over Sergeant struggling to keep up, translating for the Fifth Under Captain.
When she finished, she said, “I need to see if it’s him.”
“No. It’s an old man, tied up as you described.”
“I need to see.”
“No. It’s...” The Over Sergeant struggled with a word, then looked up something on his tablet. “It’s disgusting. Animals found the body.”
“It’s my fault,” Jayla cried, throwing herself into her captain’s arms. “It’s my fault. I killed a man.”
She cried while the soldiers searched all the cabins they could find. She cried while they flew elsewhere, landing near a crater. She recognized the town with the hospital.
“It’s no use,” she said, forcing herself to calm down. “Others have already cleaned this place out.”
She felt empty inside. No matter what the old man had done, she didn’t have the right to kill him.
She couldn’t believe she’d killed a man.
Something in her mind tried to compartmentalize the information, to block it off from her normal consciousness, but it wouldn’t go away.
She’d killed a man and abandoned her sister. What would her Daddy think about her? What would he say to her if he were still alive? What would anyone say to her? She pictured herself dragged into court for murder and child abuse, the judge slamming his gavel and sentencing her to prison for the rest of her life.
“It’s not my fault,” she wanted to scream at the judge. “He attacked first!”
But the judge, a cruel, old, white man, who looked like the broth
er of the man she killed, didn’t care. His gavel slammed down again.
Jayla forced those images away. Tried to ignore everything anyone from her world might say to her. The men she was with now didn’t judge her. They protected her.
She suddenly felt alienated from humanity. The word twisted around in her mind. A strange word.
Alien.
Jayla felt alien. As alien as the men she was with.
She was an alien now. She was Malakshian.
She cried and her captain held her.
The Fifth Under Captain, through his interpreter, offered to let Jayla stay on board the vehicle while they inspected the crater in the center of the town where Jayla had found the hospital, the crater she’d needed to detour around. He said he’d never seen the direct results of meteor bombardment and wanted to inspect it. The vehicle would take men to houses to continue foraging.
Jayla didn’t want to leave her captain’s side and stepped through the hatch with him, followed by the Over Sergeant and several other men. The vehicle disappeared behind them.
She climbed the broken road again, this time with the soldiers, making her way to a view of the crater caused by a meteor that these men, or at least the army they served in, had sent to this town. All the horrors she’d experienced came back as she made that trip again, up one side and down the other of each ripple in the road, until they were close enough together to step from the top of one to the top of the next.
All the horrors, all the evil things that had happened to her and her sister, pressed on her and she told herself that the old man had deserved to die. He deserved what he got.
Suddenly, she realized other people had also died because of her.
“The men you rescued me from. You killed them, didn’t you?”
“You asked that before,” the Over Sergeant replied gently.
“I know,” Jayla said impatiently. She’d forgotten, but now she remembered the conversation. They’d told her some ambassador had given them authority to execute rapists. That’s what Jayla had done, hadn’t she? Simply executed a rapist.
“The man you tied up. He died. But you did what was honorable. You are a hero to the other men,” the Over Sergeant said.
Jayla didn’t feel like a hero. She felt like a murderer, even though she knew it was self-defense.
She was going to need some serious therapy after this war ended.
The group reached the crater.
They climbed the rim. As they reached the top, Jayla anticipated the view she’d seen before. Instead, she heard a squelching sound, like a butcher tenderizing meat with a wooden mallet, and felt warm liquid splatter on her face and arms. An echo rang throughout the crater as a heavy body pushed her down awkwardly behind the crater rim. She fell and when she landed, she instinctively felt the liquid on her face with her hand and looked at it. It was blood with gray flecks. The Fifth Under Captain lay on top of her.
Another shot rang out.
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