Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

She flung the shirt aside, grabbed the front of his shirt in both hands, and pulled it open. It had a snap-down front, and the first couple of snaps popped loose the way they were supposed to, but the rest of them didn’t have a chance. The sides of the shirt tore instead, leaving Donna with two handfuls of cloth and a look of total astonishment.

Her nostrils flared out, and a slow grin spread across her face. “Hang onto your hat, cowboy,” she said in a voice that was breathy and deep. “We could wind up miles from here.”

“Hang onto it, hell,” Trent said, sweeping his Stetson off his head and tossing it onto the counter beside the sink. “I’m gettin’ it out of your way. You look like you mean business.”

“Damn right I mean business.” She took another couple fistfuls of his shirt and yanked them apart, ripping it all the way up his back.

Clothes went flying. Trent had never seen Donna like this, had never felt quite so out of control himself, but he wasn’t about to stop and question it. They stripped each other bare, shredding every piece of clothing they could in the process, and had their way with each other right there on the floor of the camper. If anybody was watching the pickup, they would know for sure what was going on inside, but Trent didn’t care. Let the envious bastards watch all they wanted.

“Yee-haw,” he said in the moment of calm afterward. “That was worth coming all the way to Alpha Centauri for.”

She was snuggled up against him with her head on his chest. “You think so, do you?” she asked softly.

“I don’t know. Maybe we ought to do it again just to make sure.”

“You think we’d survive it?”

“If we didn’t, I’d die happy.”

She laughed and snuggled in closer. “I just want to hold you for a while.”

“Good enough by me.” He ran his hands lightly over her back, amazed as always how warm and soft she was. Who would have believed that somebody as gentle and feminine as her could literally rip the shirt right off his body? For that matter, he’d never been quite so fired up before, either. He wondered what had triggered it. Was it just the release of so much tension built up over the last few months, or was it something about the planet? Or maybe something about Katata and her kids? If it was some kind of alien hormone, then her kind weren’t going to have any trouble fitting in around humans at all.

They were still wide awake half an hour later. Wide awake and hungry. It was about dinnertime by their clock, and the only thing they’d had for lunch had been a sandwich. So they put on fresh clothes, intending to pile into the front of the pickup and drive back downtown to find a likely place to get a burger and a beer, but when Trent opened the passenger door for Donna, he saw all the alien slime still waiting for them.

“Oh, yuck,” Donna said, which pretty much summed up how he felt about it, too. He got a shop towel from under the seat and wiped off what he could until it was soaked, then got two more out of the back and he and Donna both wiped off the rest of the goop as best they could. Trent laid out a tarp anyway, so Donna wouldn’t get any on her clothes from the stitching in the seat.

“Okay, let’s try this again,” he said, helping her up into the cab again. Then he went around to his side and climbed in himself, flipped on the lights, and headed back down the dirt street toward downtown.

There was less activity now than when they had driven through on the way to the hospital, but a couple of bars were still open. They were right across the street from one another, so Trent parked in front of the one on the right since it had an open spot handy. There were maybe half a dozen vehicles on each side of the street, and he noted with satisfaction that all of them were electric. That made a certain amount of sense when he thought about it: you couldn’t very well take a gas rig into space. Every liquid from the fuel to the crankcase oil to the transmission fluid would boil off into vacuum within a few minutes of exposure, and even if you did manage to seal everything up somehow, there wouldn’t be any gas stations where you were going. There weren’t necessarily electric generating stations on every planet, either, but any place with a settlement would have at least a wind turbine or a bank of solar cells. Onnescu obviously had more than that; there were street lights at every corner, and the bars had neon signs in the windows.

Most of the buildings were built of peeled logs, the cracks between them sealed with quarter-rounds of smaller logs nailed into place. They hadn’t been painted, but they looked almost white in the streetlight; evidently the local trees had pretty pale wood. There was a boardwalk alongside the buildings so pedestrians didn’t have to step in the mud. Trent had parked in front of a land office, and there was a hardware store next to that, and then the bar. By the laughter and music coming from inside, someone inside was having quite a party. Trent took Donna’s hand in his and said, “It looks safe enough, but if there’s trouble, we’re gettin’ out fast, okay?”

“Okay.”

Trent pushed open the swinging doors—just like an Old West saloon—and they stepped in. He had half expected the whole place to go quiet, but only a couple of people even noticed them, and they just smiled and waved.

All of the activity seemed to be centered around three or four tables that had been pushed together in the middle of the room, where everyone watched a gray-haired guy with a thin face and a big nose stretch a wide rubber band back toward his chest as if he were about to shoot it at someone. He let fly, but the rubber band didn’t go anywhere. Something about the size of a BB did, though: it bounced off a beer mug across the table from the shooter and ricocheted straight at Trent’s head. Trent ducked just in time, and heard it whack the top of his hat before it rattled off toward the bar.

Now everybody went quiet.

Trent didn’t really like being the center of attention of a bunch of strangers, but he figured since he was already there, he might as well make the most of it. He reeled back a step and said, “I been shot!”

“Lord, call the medic,” said the gray-haired guy.

“He’s busy with a family of aliens,” Trent said. He took off his hat and inspected it for damage, but he couldn’t even find a dent. “Guess I’ll live.”

“Good. I’d hate to have my last night on the planet marred by a murder. Pull up a stump, and have a beer on me.”

Trent glanced at Donna, who shrugged and said, “Sure, why not?” so they snagged a couple of chairs from a vacant table and the gray-haired guy’s friends scooted around so there was room at his table for them. There were seven or eight other men, mostly Trent’s age or younger, five or six women about the same age, and two aliens. They were about a foot taller than the humans, with dark red skin mottled with black, and thin as rails. They had two arms each, though, build pretty much like a person’s, and their heads were close enough to normal that they could probably pass for human on a dark night. They had beer mugs in front of them like everyone else, and nobody seemed to be paying them any special attention, so Trent just nodded to them along with everyone else and sat down. After an evening with Katata and her brood, these guys seemed perfectly normal.

The gray-haired guy hollered something in what sounded like Spanish to the bartender, then held out his hand to Trent and said, “Name’s Nick.”

“Trent Stinson,” Trent said. “This here’s Donna.”

“Pleased to meet you both. This is Glory.” He gave the woman to his left a squeeze. She was maybe half his age, blonde, buxom, and smiling like a lottery winner. Trent guessed she’d had three or four pints of beer besides the half-empty one in front of her.