Chiton

by L. Lindsey Flansburg

  ***

  One day the entire camp joined in our company's morning run. As usual, I paid no attention to where we were going. I simply stayed in the center of our group daydreaming about what I might share with her tonight. Perhaps I would tell her of the short time I worked as a teacher. I loved working with the children, but the school administrators couldn't understand why I was incapable of sticking to their strict agenda, while I couldn't understand how the students were expected to learn anything without my being able to spend most of the time answering all their amazing questions.

  After what seemed an exceptionally long run, we stumbled to a stop. A single voice was yelling far ahead, but I couldn't make out the words. The others seemed more nervous than usual for some reason. At last the group charged ahead and I joined in the flow. We topped a hill and as we started down I was dragged to a stop. Nub had latched onto my arm and would not let go. I looked back at him and saw pure terror in his eyes.

  "What is it," I asked.

  He only stared past me down the hill after the others without releasing his grip. I turned and watched with him unsure of what was happening. The surreal horror of the next hour never passed out of my nightmares. At the bottom of the long hill was an immense flat plain with no sign of life, except the aliens. We were looking at a building site. There were no fewer than a dozen male aliens standing or marching around on the far side of the plain, and five great yellow female aliens moving across the landscape increasing the size of the desolation. I was astonished at the difference in body type between the alien males and females. The males had relatively normal arms and legs, although only two each, head on top, body in the center. The females looked to me to be a different species entirely. Their bodies were unimaginably massive, armored boxes. Their heads were partially transparent, and I imagined that I could see a male sitting inside the head of each female. Their feet were bizarre. I could make out no legs. It looked as if their feet were long belts wrapped around dozens of geared wheels. They constantly roared as if they were angry, their breath visible as plumes of dark smoke following in their wake.

  The nearest female sat motionless and all the people from our camp ran right up to it and began stabbing at it with their pointy sticks.

  "What are they doing?" I demanded of Nub, who remained silent.

  "What are they thinking?" I demanded of myself.

  "We have to stop them!" I tried to drag Nub down the hill but he would not move. At last I broke free from his grip and took several steps down the hill. I turned back to Nub and renewed my plea, "We have to make them stop."

  Nub clearly was incapable of following. He just shook his head and mouthed the words, "No...No...No...".

  That's when I realized that he had seen this before. This is exactly what must have happened on that day when I remained in camp alone. No wonder Nub would not go. How could anyone go? I looked across the hill and saw perhaps twenty other men either standing in horror like Nub, or crouching down as if to hide. Two men were running in such erratic patterns that they were making no progress down the slope. I was consoled that not everyone was so foolish as to join in this absurdity.

  I turned back to the scene below to see a male alien climbing up onto the far side of the sleeping alien's head. The female flapped it's great ear and the male climbed inside. I was astonished and a bit nauseated to be witnessing what must be some sort of strange mating behavior.

  A moment later the company of our people at the female's feet began the stick dance and woke the sleeping female. It came to life with a terrible roar, belching black smoke from the breathing hole on top of its neck and began to move. Those men who were in front of it were crushed as it ran from those behind. I watched as two men leapt upon its tracked foot and were quickly run down by the geared wheels behind them. In a moment the survivors were left behind. The alien had escaped their hopeless attack. The entire group of survivors swarmed together then renewed their charge after it. From my vantage I watched as the creature swerved to avoid a large boulder, then resumed its otherwise perfectly straight course. Then to my horror I watched as one of the other females turned onto a path that would overrun the entire group within minutes.

  Without thinking I chose a path that would intersect with their charge just as they would reach the boulder. I ran as fast as I could, screaming at the top of my voice for them to stop. I stumbled across the trail in front of them only moments before the second alien fell upon them from behind.

  "The rock, the rock!" I was screaming as I took my own advice to, "Climb onto the rock!"

  Most of the group followed me, at first not knowing why, then with a desperate urgency as they heard the first screams of those men who had fallen so far behind in the charge that the monstrous female had already caught up to them. I watched in horror as several dozen men were crushed under her tracks, the first who simply could not escape, and then more who foolishly decided to rush back toward the huge monster holding the points of their sticks up as if it might notice them before it crushed them.

  The female passed around the rock and rushed away. At last someone sensible suggested that we should all get back to camp and I was left alone sitting on top of the great rock. I could not bring myself to follow the others. The aliens had torn up, then re-compacted the ground on both sides of the rock. I could not set foot on that unnaturally flat surface. I watched as everyone trudged back up over the hill joined by all those who had the sense to not run down the hill in the first place.

  The last person I saw crawl out from under a bush halfway up the hill, was Wilson. I was not surprised to see that he was brave enough to resist the lure of rushing to his destruction with the rest of the crowd as I had almost done. I waved to him, but I don't think he saw me. He seemed only interested in returning to camp as quickly as everyone else.

  I sat there the rest of the day watching the industrious aliens. They continually rushed back and forth across the plain as if they were still chasing people. Three times one of them sped past my rock close enough for me to make out the features of the male inside the female's transparent head, but even when I raised my claws in challenge at the last one, there was no evidence that either was aware of my presence. I came to the conclusion that the females were blind, if not also deaf and dumb, being directed somehow by the males inside.

  At last the cloud glow turned orange in the west and began to darken in the east. The day’s light rain drizzled to a near stop, allowing me to see twice as far as normal. By that time the females had all gathered together on the far side of the plain and had gone back to sleep. The male aliens crawled back out of the female's ears and wandered away over a far hill. I was left by myself to consider what I had seen. There was something extraordinarily unnatural about the female aliens. I had to wonder if they were living beings at all. Perhaps they only moved while the male aliens occupied their heads, because they had no minds of their own. The thought of a species with two sexes, but only one with a mind gave me a nauseous shiver. The males were wearing the females like empty armor shells that could be molted off, then re-worn again and again.

  I forced my mind to turn away from such a disgusting subject to a greater mystery. Nothing about this day made any sense. Why had our run led us here? Why would the first of our people have run toward the monstrous aliens? I thought that everyone knew that you were supposed to run away from the aliens? Were they trying to fight them? Did they think they were females? Males weren't made for fighting. That would be silly. That would be foolish. That would be dangerous.

  As the obvious reason for the existence of our training camp finally revealed itself, I was shaken out of my paralyzing horror by a terrible wail. I turned in recognition of my name as it changed from a searching wail of loss to a sob of faith restored. I did not see her before she hit me. I was knocked completely off the great rock and might have been injured as we crashed together onto the flat machined surface, had the female not used her wings to slow our tumble.

  "You're alive!" sh
e sobbed.

  I was mute with the fear that she was trying to devour me. I could not move because her arms and legs were all wrapped tightly around me.

  "Oh, I thought I'd lost you," she wept.

  After a moment I understood that she was only embracing me and I relaxed, not wanting to move, wishing she would never let me go. My wishes never seem to come true. She pushed me away, suddenly, almost angrily, leaving me kneeling before her wondering what I had done wrong.

  "They said that you had led the charge!" she accused. "That you directed the battle, and saved everyone who returned."

  I tried to respond, but could not form any words.

  "When I couldn't find you in camp I came looking for your body," she growled. "What are you doing here? Why didn't you return with the others?"

  I couldn't quite get a response in between her questions. I was wondering if she had really come here intending to eat my dead body. The thought of that gave me an odd pleasure.

  "What would I have done without you?" and she embraced me again.

  The foolish grin of bliss that I'm sure I wore broke into fits of childish snickering.

  "What?" she said, holding me at arms length to meet my eyes.

  I could not return her gaze for more than a moment.

  "You like me." I managed.

  "I love you, you ninny!" she declared.

  Suddenly I found myself capable of returning her gaze. I was not sure how to take her declaration. I didn't know that much about females, but the rumor was that they loved everything. "I love my pet," they might say, or "I love that color." A male might use that word if he were very intoxicated. "I love you, man!" might be heard after hours at the pub, but never in a sober moment like this.

  "I lmphhth you too," I attempted.

  That must have been enough because she returned to embracing me, and allowed me to wrap a few arms gently around her as well. This was better than the stick dance. Better than our evening talks. I could remain in the embrace of my angel forsaking all other needs until my shell sloughed away from age. All too soon, she remembered her anger at missing me and pushed me to arms length to return to her questioning.

  "You didn't answer me," she said. "What were you doing out here?"

  "Just watching," I managed to reply, thinking only of her touch.

  "Ah, reconnaissance," she concluded, stepping out of reach. "What did you learn?"

  Her official tone told me that my moment was over. I took a deep breath in a vain attempt to fill the hollow place that was left in my chest when her touch was removed. I didn't think I could look at her at that moment without rushing her and trying to renew our lost embrace. I turned away from her remembering how competent she was with that sword. If I did not want her to use it on me I must act as if she were not here. Convince myself for a moment that I was not aware of her presence. I must be like the female aliens. Like mindless machines. An important idea occurred to me, and for a moment I was almost successful in forgetting her presence.

  "What?" she demanded my attention.

  "They didn't notice us." I stated my thought aloud.

  "What?" This time she demanded an explanation.

  "We came here to fight the war with the aliens," I stated just to see if she would correct my conclusion. When she did not, I swallowed at the implication that she had been training all these males to be soldiers as if we were females. The war must be going far worse than anyone knew. I continued to think out loud, "We brought the war to them, but they just went about their business as if they didn't know we were here."

  "What are you trying to say?" she asked.

  I turned back to face her without fear of losing myself in her eyes.

  "The aliens don't know we are at war," I proclaimed. "They were completely unaware of our attack."

  "But they've been attacking our cities since they first came down out of the cloud," she debated.

  "They're not attacking us," I revealed what I now knew must be the truth. "They are just doing this," I gestured at the flat plain around us, "because they like the ground to be flat. I don't think they are aware of what they are doing to us."

  She was silent for a moment, but was not ready to admit that we were being defeated by an enemy who did not know about the war.

  "They were aware enough to kill all these men!" she insisted.

  "They only killed those men who ran under their feet," I replied.

  "They were aware enough to kill all my friends," she wept.

  I stepped closer and she allowed me to embrace her.

  "What happened to all the females?" I needed to know.

  She returned my gentle embrace, and I found it difficult to remember to breath. She held me in silence for a minute, then finally chose to answer my question.

  "It was decided that we must drive them from our world once and for all," she began. "We flew to the heart of their great hive and began attacking them wherever we found them." Her grip tightened as her story went on until I was actually having physical difficulty breathing. "At first it seemed to be working. We drove several of them into the shelter of the hive. But then... then..." I could only hold her until she found the strength to go on. "Somehow, the air began to fill with a dark cloud of poison. Any who entered the cloud fell dead. Any who touched the edge of it were sick for days after. Those few of us who escaped could not continue the fight," she admitted. "The war was lost two weeks before I found you."

  Her grip on my body went limp. I held her until she could cry no more. My mind was racing. The war was lost? We were a defeated people. Defeated by an enemy that I'm sure had no idea that any war was being fought. A single great battle had been fought, and they had seen our mightiest warriors as a momentary nuisance to be put down with a weapon that they had not used before or since. Another thought was growing in the back of my mind.

  "How many of the aliens were killed in the war?" I asked.

  She sniffled and dabbed at her tears as she considered the answer, then looked down in apparent shame. "We were never actually able to hurt any of them seriously."

  Again, I was stunned. They had decimated our population, destroyed hundreds of our cities, killed almost every queen within four weeks travel, and we had not been able to strike back with enough force to get their attention.

  "That's good," I realized.

  She gasped a short breath and nearly stepped out of my grasp. I held on to her with all my right arms, keeping my right claw over her shoulders and began to walk her back toward camp.

  "That means they have no reason to hate us," I explained. "We may have lost the war, but we may still be able to win a peace. We only need to find some way to communicate with them."