Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“Don’t like that?”

“It’s kind of clumsy.”

She thought about it for a few seconds while Trent eased them around a fallen log. “How about a valentine?”

“Perfect.” Just then he saw a glint of something silver downslope to the right. “Hey, is that it?”

Donna looked to see where he was pointing, then squinted. “I don’t know. Could be.” She got the binoculars out of their case and focused on the shiny object, and said, “Yeah, that’s it!”

“Hot damn.” Trent aimed for it, letting off the brake a little in his eagerness to make his four-wheeler truly a four-wheeler again. They jounced over a rock—a real one, judging by its jagged shape—and teetered a moment on the right-front and left-rear tires, but Trent hit the brake again and brought the pickup back under control. He wanted to roll down on his wheels, not on the roll bar.

The runaway had come to rest in a thicket of brush reminiscent of the stuff that clogged the streams on On-nescu. It didn’t have orange sap, though, or thorns. Trent parked the truck a few feet away, checked cautiously for anything moving in the sky or on the ground, then climbed out while Donna covered him with the pistol. He picked up a fist-sized rock and pitched it into the thicket next to the tire, and was happy to see that the branches didn’t writhe like tentacles or anything, so he tried a cautious step up on the trunk that had been bent over by the tire’s impact. It held his weight, so he leaned forward and grabbed the tire and pulled it out of the branches. The sidewalls were scraped up from hitting rocks and trees on the way down, but it didn’t look like anything had actually punctured it. Either the arrows weren’t sharp enough to penetrate rubber, or the tire had bounced out of their way before they had time to fall to the ground.

It only took a couple of minutes to mount it to the hub. He had to borrow a nut from one of the other wheels, which left only one wheel with all five nuts left, but that wouldn’t matter for off-roading. Trent put the jack and lug wrench away, piled back into the cab, and rubbed his hands together in satisfaction. He had his pickup back. It was beat to hell and almost out of juice, but it was whole again.

“All right,” he said happily, “let’s find us a place to call home for a while.”

They didn’t make it all the way out of the mountains. Down toward the bottom they had to use too much battery power to drive around brush and downed logs. They wound up in a gently sloping valley with a stream running through it, with a flat meadow up on a bench above the water channel and trees and bushes all around. About half the trees were arrow trees, but the others were more like cotton-woods, with big branches holding up wide canopies that provided lots of shade—and cover from aerial attack. It was as good a camping site as they were likely to find, so Trent coasted the pickup to a stop beneath one of the broad-canopy trees and set the brake.

“Well, Eve,” he said to Donna, “it looks like this is what Eden’s going to look like for you and me. What do you think?”

“I think we could have done a lot worse,” she said.

Trent took the rifle off the gun rack and stepped down to the ground, looking all around for anything that might be dangerous, but except for a few mobile rocks out in the open meadow it looked like they had the place to themselves.

The tree they had parked beneath looked like a regular Earth tree, with lots of wide branches and regular spade-shaped leaves at the ends. Nothing lived in it that Trent could see. The ground under it was covered with tiny little round-leafed plants, like those waxy little weeds that Donna kept pulling out of the garden. It looked like that was what this place used for grass. They hadn’t seen any flowers on the way down here, and there weren’t any in the meadow, either. Maybe plants on this planet hadn’t evolved flowers.

The stream was wide enough that a person couldn’t quite jump across it, but there were plenty of stepping stones. It made a happy gurgling sound as it cascaded from pool to pool. It would be a good fishing stream, if there were fish in it. Several arrows standing in the pools made Trent guess that something lived in there, something that the birds could eat. He hoped he and Donna could eat it, too. And there were the slo-mos. If those guys proved edible, the two of them wouldn’t have to worry about food for a long, long time.

They needed helmets, though. They hadn’t managed to drive out of cupid range, and they couldn’t spend their whole lives under the canopies of these big leafy trees. They could probably dodge anything that they saw coming, but there was bound to come a time when they didn’t look up quick enough, and as much as he would hate giving up his Stetson, generations of cavalry had proved that felt hats weren’t much good at stopping arrows.

He understood how people on Mirabelle must have felt all the time, wondering when death would rain down out of the sky on them. Except no amount of armor could protect them. Nothing could stop an asteroid moving thousands of miles an hour. The only way to stop that kind of attack was to stop the attacker.

He wondered if that would be possible here. Or even desirable. Arrows dropping out of the sky weren’t exactly a good thing, but the only way he could think of to stop it was to kill the cupids, and wiping out an entire species would probably cause a lot of damage up and down the food chain. Not to mention killing a lot of cupids, who might not be such bad guys once you got to know them. People thought wolves and bears had to be killed until they learned how to live with them instead.

With any luck, the question would remain academic. He and Donna needed protection now, not years from now; he wouldn’t even begin to consider eradicating the cupids unless they wound up stuck here for life.

That was a real possibility. They didn’t have enough battery power to drive out of the valley, much less jump from star to star, and even if they could charge the batteries somehow, they had no idea where they were. Way the hell and gone away from Earth, that much was sure, but that didn’t help them figure out how to get home.

Donna came around the back of the pickup and put her arm around his waist. “What you thinking about?”

“Nothin’,” he said automatically.

“What kind of nothin’?”

He smiled and gave her a squeeze. “The way too serious kind. We’ve survived a meteor strike and almost runnin’ out of air and a mountainside landing and hostile natives; that’s probably enough serious shit for one day.”

“My thoughts exactly. How about we have us a picnic lunch? We never did get that meal Andre fixing for us, and that was hours ago. My stomach’s trying to digest itself.”

Trent had been too scared and too busy to even think about food, but the moment Donna mentioned it, his mouth began to water and his stomach growled like a lion. “Oh, yeah, I could eat a horse,” he said.

“How about a ham sandwich?” she asked.

“Make it two.”

“Coming right up.” She went into the camper and started making domestic noises.

Trent followed her long enough to get their picnic blanket from under the dining table’s bench seat, then took it outside and laid it out on the ground beside the truck. He looked up into the tree and stepped out to the edge of its canopy to check the sky, but he still didn’t see anything moving. All the same, he couldn’t make himself relax. He kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Donna came out of the camper a couple minutes later with three sandwiches and a bottle of water. Trent wasn’t a big water fan, but he supposed they ought to ration the beer a little. No telling when they’d get more. Probably when he brewed some. He hoped his own stuff would taste better than the beer he got in brew pubs.