Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“We’re gonna need a translator,” Trent said. He went around the tank, sweeping his flashlight out into the night to make sure no hoodlums were waiting to ambush him, but there was only one pair of eyes out there, and they belonged to the mop-creature that continued to screech at him from about five feet away. He looked up at the top of the tank, where the first alien—an adolescent son, Trent guessed—still stood with its flashlight, and said, “We’re calling for help. He’ll be okay” The alien didn’t reply.

The truck’s lights were still blazing. Trent left them on and drove around to where they would do some good, and where he could stand beside it with the microphone in his hand and still see through the hatch. He keyed the microphone and said, “Trent Stinson calling Bigtown. Do you copy?”

He had to turn up the volume to hear anything over the barking mop and the crying baby, but he could make out Greg’s voice saying, “Bigtown here.”

“We’re at the landing site,” Trent said. “Turns out they’re aliens. Kinda lizardy guys, brown and slimy with four legs and two tentacles for arms. Pointy heads. You know what kind they are?”

“Can’t say as I do from that description,” Greg said.

“Well, we need somebody who can translate for ’em, because we can’t understand a word they’re savin’, and one of ’em’s got a big gash in the side of his head.”

Greg took a second to respond. “Is he conscious?” he asked.

“Nope,” Trent replied. “But he’s breathing, and he’s not bleeding anymore.”

Donna, from inside the tank, called out, “He’s got a heartbeat, but it’s real fast. Faster than the one who isn’t hurt.”

Trent relayed that information to Greg, and Greg replied, “The doctor says you should probably try to wake him up. That’s what he’d do with a human patient, anyway. Pinch him or slap his cheeks or do whatever it takes, but get him awake.”

“Got it.” Trent leaned toward the doorway. “He says wake him up.”

If noise could have done it, it already would have. Donna didn’t even try that. She just turned back to Trent and said, “Get me some cold water.”

He went around back to the camper and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. He never drank bottled water at home, but it was a lot more convenient on the road to just buy a case of the stuff prepackaged than to fill a bunch of jugs and canteens. He took the hand towel from the rack beside the sink, then went back and handed the water and towel through the hatch to Donna.

She wet the towel and showed it to the mother. The mother sniffed it, then touched it gingerly, then stuck the end of her tentacle in her mouth. “Bakbak,” she said, and wiggled her head.

“Is that ‘yes’ or ‘no’?” Donna asked. She lowered the towel toward the fathers head and asked, “Yes?”

“Bakbak,” the mother said again.

“Well, she isn’t trying to stop me,” Donna said, and she laid the towel on his sloping forehead. She gave that a few seconds, but when it didn’t wake him she dribbled a little water directly onto his face. The mother bent down next to him and said loudly, “Magalak! Kanado!” She patted him under his toothy jaw, then when that didn’t work she took a deep breath and gave him a good slap on the end of his nose.

That did the trick. The father snorted and turned his head aside, then he opened his eyes and tried to raise up. “Ti, ti!” the mother said, holding him down.

He groaned and raised his left tentacle to his temple. He tried to wet his lips with his tongue, then croaked, “Gatsa.”

Donna handed him the water bottle. He looked at it for a moment, and at her, then he took a tiny sip and said more heartily, “Gatsa.”

He drank a little, then tried to sit up again, and this time the mother let him. He winced at the pain in his head, but he managed it, then he looked out the door into the intense light from the pickup. “Onnescu,” he said softly, and there was wonder in his voice.

“Bakbak,” the mother said. She said something more to him that Trent couldn’t catch, and he replied with more incomprehensible words, and they twisted their tentacles together.

Donna said, “That’s right, this is Onnescu. You made it. It looks like you came here to stay.”

They damned near came here to die, Trent thought, but he didn’t say anything. They had survived the landing, and it certainly looked like they had brought enough stuff to start a new life with. That’s probably why they had landed so hard; there had to be a couple tons of tools and animals and who knew what else in their makeshift spaceship. Trent saw the corner of a chest of drawers peeking out from behind a crate of animals, and a black metal box that looked for all the world like a steamer trunk beside that.

The father swung his legs around to the only patch of bare floor left and slowly stood, leaning hard on his mate. He was wobbly, but he made it, standing there with the side of his head all covered with dried blood. Then he saw the little one holding its right tentacle protectively with its left, and he bent down and spoke softly to it.

The mother answered for it, and the little one held out its tentacle. There was a big purple spot about halfway up, and when the father gently touched it, the little one cried out in pain.

“Can you break one of those?” Trent asked.

“I wouldn’t think so,” Donna said, “but something’s sure wrong with it.”

What to do about it was even less obvious. Trent got on the radio with the doctor again, and the doctor advised bringing the father and the young one into town for him to look at.

It took a while to get that across to the alien family, but they pantomimed the father and the child climbing into the pickup and driving off several times until the aliens finally got it. The father clearly didn’t like that idea, and Trent couldn’t blame him. He didn’t know Trent and Donna from Adam, and he wasn’t about to abandon all his animals and possessions, nor leave his wife and the other two kids with them while he ran off to town—though the doctor said with a head wound like his, that’s exactly what he should do. The father pantomimed that he was okay, that he would take it easy for a few days and he would be fine. But he couldn’t very well say that about his child.

At last they settled on a solution: Katata, the mother, would take the injured child and the baby to town with Trent and Donna, while the father and his oldest son would stay with the animals and start their farm right where they landed. That had probably been his intent in coming down where he did: to be close enough to town that he could take things in to market, but far enough away that the land wouldn’t already be claimed yet. He’d succeeded in that. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the hard landing, he’d have succeeded at everything he’d set out to do. Trent had to give the guy his grudging respect. It was one thing to seal up a truck and head into the great unknown for a job hunt, but to do it in a rusty water tank, with all your family and all your possessions, one way—that took guts. And desperation. Trent couldn’t imagine what conditions on this alien’s home planet must be like if this looked like a good idea to him.

He got a bit of an idea on the drive. He had originally thought that Katata and the children could ride in the camper, but Katata took one look at the tiny table and bench seats and all the cabinets overhead and shook her head “Ti.” Even when Trent tried to explain that the cabinets were latched tight and nothing would fly open, she just pointed to the front seat and said, “Katata bok gaba.” He couldn’t very well insist that they ride in back when she obviously wanted to ride in front, so Donna squeezed in a little closer to him than usual, the child with the injured tentacle, Talana, sat next to Donna, and Katata held the baby, Dixit, on her lap.