Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

He steered wide around the leafy trees on his way back to camp, imagining cats in every one and hearing them with every noise. The stream suddenly became a liability as well as a guide, because the closer he walked to it, the more its rush of water masked any sounds that might warn him of another attack.

It was a long walk back, and much steeper than he had remembered it. He found the slo-mo he had left by the bank still in the same spot, so he picked it up and added it to his collection, but this one was still full even if it was dead, and it made the bag a lot heavier. By the time he finally saw the camper he was out of breath and sweating like a horse, but he called out to Donna as soon as he got within shouting range, “Hey, are you okay in there?”

She didn’t answer. Fearing the worst, he dropped the tarp full of shells and sprinted the last few hundred feet to the pickup, his shoulder-guards slipping around and flailing at his chest and back as he ran. He stuck his head inside the door, but it was too dark inside for him to see anything. “Donna?” he said. “Donna!”

“Mmmm?” she said sleepily.

“Are you okay?”

“Hmm?” He heard her move, then she said, “Holy shit, what happened to you!”

“Nothing. I just… I was just running. You’re all right?”

“Yeah. I guess I must have fallen asleep.” She tapped the computers keyboard and the screen lit up. It had gone to sleep, too. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“More than that. I found this planet’s equivalent of a mountain lion. They hang out in trees.” He backed out of the camper and looked up into the canopy of the one overhead, but he didn’t see anything but leaves and branches up there.

Donna didn’t like his news. “A mountain lion! Jesus. That’s all we need.”

Trent said, “It ran off when I threw stuff at it, so I don’t think it was all that intent on gettin’ me, but we’ve got to keep our eyes out.” And of course they now had to worry about attack from above even when they were under the trees. The shine was definitely coming off this particular apple.

He went back to the tarp and retrieved his slo-mo shells, dropping them next to the wheel he’d removed. He thought about setting to work cleaning them out and tying them onto the tire, but he was still too jittery to work, and besides, his stomach was growling worse than the cat.

Donna was standing in the doorway with the blanket around her, shivering from the cold. And now that he thought about it, it hadn’t been just the lack of the computer screen to light up the camper that had made it so dark in there; it was starting to get darker outside, too.

“To hell with this,” Trent said. “We’ve got to get some hot food in us. I’ll start a fire and we can roast hot dogs or something.”

“Sounds good to me,” Donna said.

Trent picked a spot a little ways away from the truck, but still protected from the rain by the tree’s canopy, and stacked some kindling there. He would normally get some rocks and make a fire ring, but the ground was so soaked that there was no real need, and he had thrown all the easy rocks on the counterweight anyway. He got a couple of bigger logs ready to put on the kindling, then got some matches from the camper and tried to light it.

The sticks wouldn’t catch. They were soaked through, because he’d used the tarp for a ground cloth and a carrying sack all afternoon. They sizzled and popped and even blackened a little after the fourth or fifth match, but he couldn’t get a flame out of even the tiniest twig.

He tried putting some paper underneath, and that burned merrily for a few seconds, but it didn’t light the kindling any better than the match had.

“Dammit,” he said when the paper burned out. “That should have started at least the little stuff.”

“Maybe the wood’s green,” Donna said.

“It’s driftwood.”

“Maybe this kind of wood doesn’t burn, then.”

“Huh?” He looked up at her.

“It’s alien wood on an alien planet. Maybe it doesn’t burn.”

“It’s wood,” he said. “It’s got to burn.” He crumpled up another piece of paper and stuck it underneath the kindling, but it did no more good than the first one.

“All right,” he said. “Maybe this stuff won’t light, but there’s two kinds of tree. Let’s see how arrows burn.” He picked up one from the pile they’d brought over from the trees they’d cut down, digging to the bottom to get the driest one he could find, then breaking it over his knee to expose the even drier wood inside. It took a pretty good bend to make it snap, and when it did, it splintered into long fibers. Perfect.

Except it wouldn’t light any better than the other stuff. Trent used up three more sheets of paper just trying to get the toothpick-sized splinters at the ends to go, but no luck. They turned black like the other twigs, but when Trent rubbed them with his fingers he saw that the black was just soot from the paper. The twigs hadn’t even charred.

“Okay, time for a little chemical persuasion,” he said, standing up, but he stopped before he had even taken a step toward the camper. He hadn’t packed any charcoal or lighter fluid, because he hadn’t packed a barbecue. Too much weight. Neither he nor Donna smoked, so they didn’t have a butane lighter. He tried to think what else they might have that was flammable, but he came up blank. They didn’t even have a camp stove, because they had an entire camper with an electric stove in it. About the only thing they had that was flammable was their clothing and bedding. There was the cabinetry, Trent supposed, but they would have to be a lot more desperate than they were now to start burning that.

“For the first time,” he said, “I wish I had a gas-powered rig. At least gasoline is good for startin’ fires.”

Donna said, “How about booze? Alcohol burns, doesn’t it?”

That was a thought, but all he’d brought was a case of Budweiser. “We’d have to figure out some way to distill it out of beer,” he said.

“Which requires heat.”

“Not to mention wasting good beer.”

Donna squinted her eyes, obviously chasing down an elusive thought, but if she ever caught it, she didn’t let on.

“What?” Trent asked.

“Nothing. I was thinking about the sap that we got on our parachute, but we washed most of that out.”

They had, but since it was water soluble, he doubted if it had been very flammable anyway. On the other hand… “We didn’t wash out the shop towel. Let’s try that.” He opened the driver’s door and was momentarily blinded by the dome light. He hadn’t realized how dark the day was getting. He squinted so he wouldn’t blow his night vision any worse than it already was and fished around under the seat until he found the shredded remains of the towel, then he closed the door and half felt his way back to the camp-fire. He nestled the towel under the little pile of kindling, then put a match to it and leaned back.

The towel smoldered a little, but didn’t catch. Trent moved the match right under an orange spot, but that didn’t even smolder.

“Shit,” he said. “Doesn’t anything alien burn?”

“Wait a minute!” Donna said. “What about that stuff Katata’s husband gave us?”

They had never even opened the bottle. Trent wouldn’t drink the stuff on a bet, not without finding out what was in it first, but he certainly didn’t mind trying it as fire-starter.

“What the heck; let’s give it a whirl,” he said, rising to go get it, but Donna was already ahead of him. She went into the camper and came back out a moment later with the bottle of green whatever-it-was and one of their flashlights. She handed the light to Trent and struggled to open the bottle.