This was an underground creek, not a river, shallow enough to walk in—or rather duck-walk since the ceiling was too low for standing.
“What do we do now?” Ethan whispered, his scared voice barely rising above the noise from the cavern.
“We can’t go back in there yet. Those two are looking for us.” I thought a moment. “In fact, when they don’t find our bodies or catch up to us in the main passage, they may remember this side stream. Let’s follow it. Quickly. The guide said it leads outside.”
That sounded simple enough. It wasn’t. As we moved farther back, the last trace of light from the cavern vanished. It was as dark as it had been during that tour demonstration. The dry rock beside us was as raspy as sandpaper. The rocks below were slippery with cold, wet slime.
After a while, the scared energy that had been driving me faded. I was almost numb from cold, and my arms and legs were shaking and bruised from banging into rocks.
“Let’s rest a minute,” I gasped when I found myself on a dry, flattish rock. “I can’t see or hear anything coming after us.”
I felt Ethan crawl up beside me. He was shivering. I put an arm around him.
“I’m sorry, little cousin,” I forced myself to say. I felt almost as numb from the truth as from the cold. “I never really believed you like I should have. Those guys were trying to kill you, and they have weapons like people . . . like humans just don’t have.”
“They are aliens, aren’t they?” he said faintly.
I nodded, but of course he couldn’t see that. I said what I didn’t want to hear. “And I guess you are too. I wish I’d believed you earlier. You probably are some sort of lost alien prince.”
“I don’t . . . I wasn’t . . . ” He choked to a stop, his body shaking now like he was crying. Suddenly, he pushed himself off the rock. “Let’s go. We can’t let them catch us!”
His clattering and splashing showed he was moving faster than he should in this dark. “Slow down!” I hissed. “Make that much noise, and they’ll hear us.”
He seemed to slow but was still ahead of me. Passing him up, I bumped my head. The ceiling was getting lower. The farther we went, the lower it got, forcing us to crawl. I started feeling like the whole mountainside was pressing down on me. If it hadn’t been for the cool breeze I might have panicked and fled back to face the aliens. But then, I had another alien here to try and protect.
As we floundered on, I heard new rumbling. Was more of the cavern caving in? Were our parents and all those other people all right?
Suddenly, my attention snapped back to us. Either the water was getting higher or the ceiling was getting a lot lower. There wasn’t much room between the two any more. Like salamanders, we half swam, half crawled along the stream. The current was strong, but when we tried to lift ourselves out of it, we scraped against rough rock. And now that rock ceiling was wet. At times there might be nothing but water in this little tunnel. We could drown!
The rumbling was louder. It sounded like . . . like thunder. Maybe it was raining again outside. That’s why the stream was rising!
“Hurry!” I said as water sloshed into my mouth. I jerked and scraped my head on rock.
Ethan got the point. I could hear him scooting behind me. In fact, when I looked back, I could almost see him. A black shape against lesser black. Were we coming to daylight?
My battered head pressed against the ceiling, and water nearly blinded me. But there was light ahead. I grabbed a breath between waves and scrambled on. Suddenly, water was coming from above as well. Out of a thunderous gray sky, rain poured down on us. I’d never felt anything so welcome in my life!
“Over here!” Ethan had rushed out. His voice now came from my left. “There’s a kind of shelter.”
Staggering to stand up, I stumbled his way. Soon we were crouched side by side under a rock ledge. It wasn’t much protection. A strong wind battered the rain right onto us.
Like a frog, Ethan scrambled further left. “It’s better over here. Almost dry.”
At the back of the overhang, the ground was dusty and scattered with dry leaves. I wondered briefly about wild animals but decided they’d be better than torrential rain or murderous aliens.
For a while, we huddled in silence. Ethan was shivering again, and there was enough light to see he was crying. I put an arm around him.
“Next time you tell me anything, Ethan, I promise I’ll believe you. Unicorns in your backyard—anything.”
“But you shouldn’t!” he sobbed. “You shouldn’t have believed me. I didn’t, not deep down. I knew it was sort of a game, but I wanted it to be true. So I pretended harder and harder until I almost believed it. But now. . . now I don’t want it to be true. I don’t want to be an alien! I want to be just an ordinary kid with ordinary parents. I know they’re not great parents, but they’re human. I want to be human too!”
He curled up in a ball and shook with sobs. I held him tight, crying a little too. Sure, boys aren’t supposed to cry, but they aren’t supposed to go through stuff like this either. I was worried about my parents. I was worried those ghastly bloated aliens would track us down. And most of all, I was worried about my crazy alien cousin. He was the real thing.
The rain looked like it would never let up. No one could move in a torrent like that, so I guessed we were safe enough for the moment. After a while, exhausted and huddled together in our cold dry den, we both fell asleep.
It may have been hours later when we woke up. The sky beyond the rocky ledge was clotted with dark clouds that flashed and rumbled. But the rain had stopped.
I started to move, then froze. Against the lightening-lit sky, I saw something. A dark, standing shape.
The dark figure snorted and swayed as it stood against the sky. Not an alien . . . a bear! Big improvement. I should have known sheltering in a cave was a bad idea.
Beside me, Ethan whimpered and pulled his knees up to his chin. The creature dropped to all fours and began waddling away. I blinked, trying to get the scale of the thing. Too small for a bear. It looked back at us, black eyes glinting from a mask of dark fur. Dark fur striped the bushy tail. A raccoon!
Ethan began giggling. And soon we were both gasping with laughter, loud enough to drive away a herd of bears. Or attract a couple of aliens.
“Quiet!” I whispered sharply. “They may still be looking for us.”
That shut down the laughing. “They may use some alien device to track us down,” Ethan whispered. “We’ve got to go!”
Ethan stood up quickly, grazing his head on the rocky roof. I stood cautiously. “Yeah, but we can’t just run. We’ve got to think first. Other people could be looking for us too—our parents and the police or park rangers.”
Ethan walked nervously to the edge of the overhang and looked out. “But they may think we were crushed by that falling rock and be looking for our bodies in there. Clyde and Bill must have seen us jump off, or they wouldn’t have followed us up the passage. The guide in their boat probably mentioned that side stream too. They could be following us now!”
“They’re too fat for that route,” I pointed out. “But maybe they’ve left the cave and are trying to find where that side passage comes out. Let’s move! If we can just find other people before those guys find us, we should be all right.”
As we stepped from under the ledge, hanging ferns scattered raindrops on us. The dark clouds were moving farther away, but the sky was not very comforting. It was pink with sunset. Soon it would be night.
“How are we going to find anything in the dark?” Ethan whimpered.
I looked down at the stream that bubbled past us before dropping into the little cave we’d crawled from. “Just follow the stream. That’ll keep us from walking around in circles like they say happens when you’re lost in the woods. The stream’s bound to run into a road or bridge sooner or later.”
Following the stream wasn’t hard at first. There was still enough pinkish light from the sunset sky. But soon it was harder no
t to trip over roots or get entangled in briars. From the darkening forest around us came sounds of frogs, insects, and mournful birds. The cool air smelled wet and moldy. Sometimes noisy things, raccoons or whatever, crashed through the bushes. We froze for frightened moments, scarcely daring to breathe.
Just as I was beginning to think we’d have to give up and find someplace to hide for the night, a full moon edged into sight beyond the trees. Its silvery pale light shifted with the wind-stirred leaves, showing us where to put our feet.
Soon afterward the little stream spread out into a reedy pool below a cliff and disappeared.
“I don’t get it,” Ethan complained. “How can a stream just stop?”
I looked at the base of the cliff where bubbles, silvered by the moonlight, rose through the dark water. “Maybe it starts here, from an underground spring. Bummer. Now we’ve got to follow something else.”
What I really wanted to do was cry like a baby and wait till my mother found me. We were lost, in the woods, at night. That was nightmare enough—even without murderous aliens. But I was the big kid here, the one supposed to look out for his little cousin. And, alien or not, he was still family.
I looked around. “Okay, this cliff will do. Follow it until we find a house or something. Then someone will call the police for us, and everything will be all right.” I tried to sound as if I believed that.
Following the cliff was not easy. Rocks were tumbled along its base, and if we moved away too far, we lost sight of the cliff behind the trees. But then the ground became more even and open. It was Ethan who figured out why.
“Hey, Zack, I think we’re on a road!”
I stopped and looked around. It was hard to be sure of anything among the jumbled shadows and moonlight, but along a strip in two directions there were no trees. The ground was hard with gravel.
“You’re right! Doesn’t look like it’s been used for years, but it’s got to lead somewhere!”
We moved on with hopeful steps, occasionally scrambling over fallen trees. Then the road divided.
The track to the left was more overgrown, so we turned right. We hadn’t gone far before we stopped, rooted with fright. Something was crashing through the woods. Something big. It was getting closer. I was too scared to run or hide or do anything except hope that whatever it was didn’t see us.
A big buck burst from the trees ahead of us. With only a fleeting glance, it charged past us down the road.
Ethan laughed nervously. “A deer. It sounded like Godzilla.”
“Or like Godzilla was after it,” I joked. Not a very good joke. What could scare a deer that badly? After all, it lived in the night woods all the time. It wouldn’t get spooked by a raccoon. But a real bear? Maybe. Or worse.
“Let’s hurry,” I said. “I’m getting really hungry.
“Right. I could eat ten triple cheeseburgers and a carload of fries. What do you. . . ”
I grabbed his arm to silence him, then pointed. Off to our right, where the deer had come from, a light moved in the forest. A flashlight maybe. Rescuers? There was something wrong about the light, though. It had kind of an odd violet tinge, like lights in science demonstrations that make rocks glow.
“If they’re rescuers, they should be calling our names,” Ethan whispered.
“And they should be using ordinary flashlights,” I added. “Back to the other road!” Hurrying back to where our road forked, we took the overgrown way. We weren’t much quieter than that panicky deer.
Our track ran along the bottom of a small canyon. On either side rose piles of squared boulders covered with vines. The road widened, and we began to run, then grabbed at each other, stumbling to a stop. A few feet ahead of us, the road ended. Beyond it and way below it, moonlight glinted on water. Green, deep-looking water.
Inching forward, we peered over the edge. The pool was large with squared, rocky sides. In fact, all around and above us, rock cliffs and ledges looked oddly even and blocky. Suddenly, I remembered a field trip from last year.
“An old quarry,” I whispered. “That’s what the road must have been built for.”
“So the way out of the woods will be the other direction—where the light’s coming from.”
I looked around. The shadows among the giant stone blocks were inky black. “Let’s hide. Maybe whatever it is will go past.”
We skirted the edge of the drop-off and took shelter behind a wall of huge tumbled stones. Several leaned together to make a tent of darkness. Ethan dashed toward it, but I whispered, “Wait! There might be snakes.”
Grabbing a stick off the ground, I rattled it around in the dark space, though whether this would make snakes leave or get mad, I didn’t know. When nothing happened, we stepped inside.
Crouching in the dark, we listened. An owl called not far away, and frogs or insects with big throaty voices creaked and chugged from the water below. The smell of wild roses drifted through the night. Time oozed past. I was about to suggest we go, when the rhythmic chugging from the pond stopped. Ominous silence was broken by a faint crunching of gravel.
I peered out of our shelter. On the pale stone around us, I could see a faint violet glow. Quickly I drew back. Shadows moved eerily over the rock as the light slowly shifted. They must be using some sort of weird flashlight, I realized, one that helped their alien eyesight. Then a voice broke the stillness.
“No need to hide any longer. We know you’re there. Come out now and make this easier.”
“No way,” Ethan muttered behind me. I shook my head, afraid they might have super-alien hearing. Apparently they didn’t.
The voice came again, from further away. “You can’t hide—we’ll find you. And you can’t fight because you haven’t learned to use the power yet. If you give up now, we’ll let you live. We’ll take you away from here—back where you belong.”
I tensed up. Ethan just might fall for that. But he didn’t. “I don’t belong with murdering monsters like them,” he muttered. “Let’s find a better hiding place.”
He slipped away before I could stop him. But he was right. It wouldn’t be hard to track us down here.
Ethan had disappeared around another square-cut boulder. I followed to find him scrambling up a crevice in a rocky cliff. Might as well quit worrying about snakes, I decided. At least snakes were from Earth.
Vines and tree roots made it easier to climb than I’d thought. Nature had been busy reclaiming the sides of this quarry. I joined Ethan on a shallow ledge, then pulled us both down flat. A circle of violet light was moving from behind a rock.
Like lizards, we crawled along the ledge to a shadowed corner. Then, wedging ourselves between rock and the trunk of a young pine, we worked our way up to the next ledge.
This ledge was deeper, and at the back a cleft in the rock made a small cave. Crouching there, I wished I’d some clue what this place looked like in daylight. All we were doing was taking the first route we saw to get higher and farther away. But we could be trapping ourselves as easily as escaping.
The silence stretched on. I peered down at the quarry below. In the moonlight, the limestone looked ghostly white, with sharp rock edges outlined in deepest shadow. We could have been in some ruined jungle temple. And I wished we were. I’d take cobras, panthers, and angry tribespeople any time.
“If we can climb to the top of the quarry hole,” Ethan whispered, “maybe we can lose them in the woods.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave this hiding place. If only the enemy would give some sign of where they were. But Ethan was already scuttling along this one ledge and pulling himself up to another one.
Just as I reached that second ledge, the air above us quivered. With a splintering crack, a rock overhead shattered and rained down in sharp, hot chunks.
We huddled together, arms thrown over our heads. Again the voice echoed over the quarry.
“If you make it easier to kill you than capture you, we will! But if you want to live, come down. You might as well. You know yo
u don’t belong here. We can take you where you do belong. We can take you home!”
In a shadowed corner of rock, Ethan suddenly stood up. “Forget it, turkeys! I belong here! Maybe this wasn’t always my home, but it is now. Go back to wherever you come from and leave me alone!”
I felt proud of him and wished he’d shut up at the same time. But I didn’t have much time for either thought.
Violently, the air quivered. The far end of our ledge exploded into stinging gravel. When I could open my eyes against the dust, I saw Ethan fumbling at the pendant around his neck.
“They said I hadn’t learned how to use the power yet. But I’ve tried. If only I had more time!”
Beyond his crouching figure, I saw that the blast seemed to have opened a new escape route.
“Forget the pendant. Move!” I barked, pushing him ahead of me down a narrow channel in the rock. After a few feet, he squealed and stopped dead.
“Whoa! End of the line!”
I peered around him. There was nothing there. A sheer cliff dropped down to water. Dark, silent water, too dark for even the moonlight to knife into.
For seconds, I felt hopelessly trapped. But neither of us was the giving-up sort. The rocky groove that we’d followed was slightly higher than our heads. Ethan fumbled at its rough sides, trying to find footholds. I knelt down, let him stand on my knee, and gave him a boost up. He flailed and shoved but finally pulled himself out. Then he swiveled around and reached down for me.
After I’d made the top, we crouched low and ran across this new ledge. It ended suddenly. A dozen feet below was another ledge. Between the two stretched a pine tree growing stubbornly in some shallow pocket of soil. For a moment, Ethan looked frantically about. Then, like a panicky squirrel, he leaped across to the tree and started clambering down.
I crouched, ready to follow. Again a wave of quivering air shot toward us. It slammed into the base of the tree. Sawdust and splinters billowed upward. The tree toppled onto the ledge below us.
My Cousin, the Alien Page 5