Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

The rock had shifted an inch or so. Probably came loose when he went into the camper. He nudged it up snug again, then spun lug nuts on the four open studs and cinched them down with the wrench, along with the one that had been holding the wheel on by itself. That one was pretty badly stripped, but he managed to get it snug again.

The rock was loose again when he finished. He shoved it tight against the tire, then went around and started jacking up the pickup, which crept forward until the right front tire was tight against the rock, but then it stayed put.

It took quite a bit of cranking to get the hub up high enough to fit the wheel on it, but the jack had just enough reach. Trent bolted the wheel in place as quickly as he could, then found another rock and wedged that in front of the tire before he lowered the jack. This rock was practically identical to the other one: helmet shaped and flat bottomed. A perfect wheel chock. He lowered the tire onto it, and was glad to see it sink into the dirt an inch or so under the pickup’s weight. With both front wheels blocked like that, the truck shouldn’t go anywhere now.

Just in case, he climbed up to the cab and set the emergency brake, grabbed his hat from the dashboard, and jumped back to the ground. He was going to need to get that other tire out of there before long, but he didn’t want to mount it until he had the mate for it. Now he regretted letting that spare go.

At least the truck was sitting level now. The tire he had just mounted was kind of low, but not flat, which was actually about perfect to match the slope. The rear bumper was touching ground all the way across now, and the rope that Donna had tied to the tree was slack. Trent hiked up and untied it, then coiled it up and tossed it into the camper.

Donna had been sipping her beer and watching the whole proceedings with amusement.

“What?” he asked.

She grinned. “You’re never happier than when you’re messing around with mechanical stuff.”

“True,” he said. He walked over and put his arms around her. “Except maybe when I’m messing around with you.”

He heard a swish and a thunk just behind him, and Donna’s eyes widened like camera irises. He turned around to see a four-foot arrow quivering in the ground right where he’d been standing.

“Into the camper!” he hollered, giving her a swat on the butt. “The pistols in the clothing drawer.”

He jumped up to the cab and pulled open the door, unhooked the bungees holding the rifle in the gun rack, then leaped back down, jacked a round into the chamber, and fired uphill. He didn’t bother to aim; he just wanted to make whoever was shooting at them duck until Donna was safely under cover.

The gunshot echoed away to silence. Trent ran a couple of steps to spoil the aim of anybody who might be thinking of taking a second shot, then glanced back at the arrow in the ground to see if he could tell from the angle it hit where the archer was, but it was pointing almost straight up. He looked into the treetops, thinking maybe they had a sniper up in one of the tufts of branches at the top, but there didn’t seem to be much room for anybody in those trees. A gray bird about the size of a turkey vulture was flapping down to land on one, but there was no sign of anybody with a bow.

“Trent, get in here!” Donna called out from the camper.

He took a couple fast steps to the side, swirling around to look in as many directions as he could, but he couldn’t spot any movement. Just the bird, which was too heavy for the branch it was trying to land on. The branch snapped off at the base, and the bird flapped away with it clutched in its claws.

Had someone been shooting at the bird? That arrow had come almost straight down; not likely if Trent had been the target. But who would be shooting at birds when a pickup truck with two aliens in it had just dropped out of the sky?

He didn’t hear any battle cries, or even any animal noises that might be natives communicating with fake bird calls. The only noise on the hillside was the pounding of his own heart. He jumped to the left another two steps, putting himself just one leap away from the camper door, but he didn’t really want to reduce his field of vision to a two-foot-wide rectangle, especially one that faced into a hillside. A whole army could sneak up on them and they’d never know it from in there.

He looked up at the bird, just in time to see it drop the branch. It had carried it quite a ways before letting go, circling halfway around and rising another thirty or forty feet above the treetop. Trent watched the branch arch downward, not tumbling the way he would expect. The tufts of needles at the end stabilized it so it came straight down—straight at Trent.

He leaped backward, tripped over a rock, and sprawled on his back, firing a wild shot into the air when he hit. The branch thunked into the ground right where he’d been standing, just like the first one.

“Trent!” Donna yelled, rushing out of the camper. She grabbed him by the arm with her left hand and tugged him toward the doorway, the pistol waving wildly in her right hand, but she stopped when he began laughing.

“It’s not funny!”

“Look,” he said, pointing upward.

The bird circled around and flapped in for a landing atop another tree, picking one of the dry branches at the base of the tuft. The branch broke off under its weight and it flapped away with it, spiraling upward until it was about twice as high as the treetop before straightening out and dropping it.

“Stand back!” Trent warned, rolling to his feet and backing away another few feet. Donna backed away with him, keeping her eyes trained upward, until the arrow shwonked into the dirt right where she had been standing.

“That… that bird just tried to kill us!” she said, her voice rising in indignation.

“It does seem pretty deliberate,” Trent said. He raised his rifle and followed its flight as it swept toward another tree, but he didn’t fire. “You think it’s intelligent?” he asked. “We’re pretty much stuck here; I don’t want to go pissin’ off the locals if I can help it.”

“It’s already trying to kill us,” Donna said. “I don’t know how much worse it can get.”

“A hundred of ’em at once,” Trent said, but she had a good point. They were already under attack. They had to show these birds, intelligent or not, that you couldn’t try killing a human without consequences.

“Sorry, buddy,” Trent whispered, bringing the rifle up to his shoulder and sighting through the scope, keeping his left eye open to track the bird as it flapped in to land on another arrow branch. There was a half-second of stillness while the branch bore its weight; Trent brought the scope to bear directly in the middle of its body and squeezed off a shot.

The bird’s chest exploded in a shower of silver disks, as if it had been stuffed with quarters. The branch broke at the same moment, and bird and branch both fell straight to the ground, the disks fluttering down like leaves after them.

The tree was maybe fifty feet upslope. “Keep your eye out for more,” Trent said to Donna, and he started climbing up toward it, kicking his boots sideways into the hill for better footing and looking upward every few steps.

The branch had arrowed into the ground like the others. The bird lay on its back just a few feet away, dead. The bullet had punched right through its body, not doing a whole lot of external damage, but thick, dark blood—almost black it was so dark—oozed like molasses out of the bullet hole, and there was a big bare patch of gray-blue skin where a bunch of quarter-sized translucent scales had been knocked loose. The remaining ones overlapped like fish scales, giving the bird an aerodynamic, almost metallic look. The scales were smaller on the wings and head, and curved to match the contours of its body. Its head was about the size of a hawks, with the same kind of beak. Good for tearing flesh. It didn’t look like there was room for much brainpower in there, but Trent wasn’t going to jump to conclusions just yet.