Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

It was coming down a couple miles to the south. Trent watched until it dropped behind the hill, then went back to work on the bushes. He was getting better at it with practice; he learned to slice upward rather than downward, so the roots would hold the bushes in place while the machete cut through the stalks. That way it only took him another ten minutes or so to cut a path down to the water.

It felt like the middle of the forest primeval down there. It was only thirty feet wide or so, but the bushes gave way to full-size trees along the banks, and the trees leaned over the water from both sides, shading out what little light was left in the day. Trent bet it would be gloomy down there even at noon.

He stuck a hand in the water. At least it was cool. He wondered if it was safe to drink. Then he wondered if it was even safe to stand right next to the bank like he was. Some rivers on Earth had crocodiles in them, just waiting for dummies like Trent to lean over and provide an easy snack.

He needed a flashlight. He backed away and scraped his way through the hole he’d cut in the thicket, went around to the passenger side of the truck, and got the light out of the glove box. It was a plasma-cell Q-beam, basically an aircraft landing light powered by a small version of the same kind of battery that ran the truck’s wheel motors. He switched it on and aimed it at the tunnel into the forest.

If it had looked spooky before, it looked doubly so now. Stark shadows splayed out in all directions, all pointing directly away from him and bobbing and weaving with his every motion. He advanced into it anyway, crouching low to squeeze through the gap. then standing up among the trees and shining the light around in a slow circle. The trees were covered in moss, and vines hung down over the water from some of them, but the vines didn’t move, and the trees were just trees. He shined the light into the water and saw that it was crystal clear, and not very deep. It was mostly gravel-bottomed riffles connecting shallow pools. If there were crocs in it, they would have a hell of a time swimming very far.

He shined the light straight up. Nothing waiting to jump on him from overhanging branches.

“Trent?” Donna asked from the inner edge of the bushes. “Is it safe? Can I come in there and wash up?”

“I think so,” he answered, but when he thought of Donna leaning down over the water, maybe even sticking her face into it, he said, “You know what, we don’t have to re-invent the wheel here. We’re close enough to Bigtown to reach ’em by radio; why don’t we fire it up and just ask someone before we do something stupid.”

“That makes sense, I guess,” Donna said.

They squeezed out through the bushes again, adding yet more orange stains to their clothes. Donna’s white T-shirt looked like someone had tried to put tiger stripes on it. Trent was wearing a brown and blue cotton work shirt, so it wasn’t so apparent on him, but he made a mental note not to wear anything he cared about until he knew whether or not the sap would wash out.

He leaned into the cab of the pickup and flipped on the CB, tuning to channel 19, the informally agreed-upon general-contact channel. It was already busy, so he waited for a break where he could interrupt, but then he heard one voice say, “…at least twenty miles south of town…” and another voice said, “…nobody out that way that I know of,” and he started listening.

“We can’t just leave ’em out there,” said the first voice.

“We can if we can’t get to ’em,” said the second. “They’ll have to wait ’til morning. Unless you want to try drivin’ twenty miles in the dark. Or landin’ in the dark.”

Trent picked up the microphone and said, “Break one-nine. This is Trent Stinson, and I’m quite a ways south of town at the moment. Is there something I can help you with?” He had a bad feeling he knew what the problem was.

“Hold up, Greg,” the second voice said when he released the microphone switch. “There’s somebody else on the channel. Who’s that again?”

“The name’s Trent, and I’m south of Bigtown by at least fifteen miles with a good cross-country rig. You got an emergency out this way?”

“We don’t know for sure,” said the first voice, Greg, “but we think there might be. We got a couple garbled transmissions from somebody on their way down about twenty minutes ago, but their signal stopped cold when they hit the ground. Could be nothing, but they could be hurt.”

“You sure they didn’t just bail out at the last moment?” Trent asked.

“It’s possible, but we’re pretty sure he went all the way. There was a hell of a crashing sound just before the signal cut off.”

Donna said softly, “That’s got to be the one we watched come in.”

“Yeah,” Trent said. The pretty light in the sky. Now he felt somehow guilty for enjoying its descent. He looked up at the patch of hillside it had gone behind and keyed the microphone. “Roger, unless somebody else was in the air about the same time, we saw ’em come down just a couple of miles away. I’ve got a pretty good direction fix on their landing site. We could probably be there in half an hour if there aren’t any of these damned brush-choked streambeds between us and them.”

Greg said, “If you’re south of the Greenwall, you’re clear for quite a ways.”

“I don’t know if this is the greenwall, but we’re sure south of a greenwall.”

“Well then, I imagine the folks out there would appreciate it if you could go check in on ’em. Do you know first aid?”

“The basics,” Trent said. “We may need to talk with somebody who knows more once we get there. You got a doctor?”

“We can get one by the time you need him.”

“All right, then. We’re on our way.”

Donna said, “Give me a minute to batten down the hatches in back,” and disappeared inside the camper.

Greg said, “Let’s shift up to channel 22 for further contact.”

“Okay. Shifting to 22.” Trent punched the “channel-up” button three times. “Trent Stinson here, transmitting on 22. You read?”

“Loud and clear.”

“All right. We’ll keep you posted on our progress. Stinson out.”

Trent clipped the microphone back on the dashboard and climbed up to stand in the open doorway where he could reach the smiley-face covers over the spotlights mounted on the roll bars and on the top of the camper. There were six lights: three aimed forward, one for each side, and one aimed straight back. He uncovered them all, then sat in the driver’s seat and flipped the master switch. The hillside and the brush and the trees flashed into brilliant relief, even brighter than with the handheld light. And all around them, only fifteen or twenty feet away, dozens of creatures the size of big dogs stood blinking in the sudden glare.

They were dark gray, four-legged, and had big, round heads with large, toothy mouths. He didn’t think they’d sneaked up just to see what he and Donna were doing. He yelled, “Close your door!” and slammed the driver’s door, then lunged across the seat and grabbed the passenger door just as one of the creatures leaped for him. It clipped the end of the door as he swung it around and fell back to the ground with a loud yelp of surprise.

“Donna, are you all right?” Trent shouted, but the screeching sound from the back of the truck didn’t sound good. He flipped open the glove box and grabbed the pistol, aimed it out the passenger window, and fired at the nearest dog-creature. The noise was deafening inside the cab, and he didn’t even come close to hitting his target, but the shot did what he’d hoped it would do anyway: all of the creatures on that side of the truck turned tail and ran into the night. Trent spun around on the seat and fired out the driver’s window, and the few on that side that hadn’t already fled left claw marks in the grass as they skedaddled—except for the one that his wild shot had hit. That one flipped end over end, yelping and contorting its body from side to side as it ran blindly into the thicket, bounced off the net of branches, and fell over, still twitching and howling in pain.