Caveman Alien's Trap

by Calista Skye

  He’s amazing, too. I’m starting to understand what made the other girls marry their cavemen the first chance they got. To me, each of them seem primitive and strong and quiet. But if this is the way they act when alone with their woman, then I’ll have to change my opinion of them.

  Or maybe Xark’on is the only one.

  We finally come to the ridge, and there’s his construction site down in the valley.

  “Any sign of the dragon?” I whisper.

  “The dragon?”

  “The monster. Troga.”

  We stand still for a minute, just staring down in the valley and the glassy trench before he answers. “No. She rarely comes here. Only you attracted her.”

  Yeah, that’s not a great thought. “You think so?”

  He starts walking down the ridge. “I do.”

  I hesitate. I don’t want to attract that thing again. Maybe I should just go home.

  I walk up the ridge to where I was spying from. The raptor is gone, so it probably wasn’t injured that badly if it could limp away. Or maybe the other creatures in this jungle have eaten it.

  My spear is still right where I dropped it. I pick it up, and feeling its weight in my hand and seeing the sharpness of the irox tooth at the end of it doesn’t make me feel safer at all. That bubble of security around Xark’on isn’t around me anymore, and it makes me jittery.

  Xark’on’s found his sledgehammer down there, and he’s starting work on his mysterious project. It’s got something to do with digging a hole. A very large hole. I assumed it would be the foundation for something, but seeing it now, I think it might just be a hole.

  Is he making a pool?

  Miles away from his house? A man who couldn’t swim until this morning? Okay, cavemen are aliens. I suppose they can do weird things. But not this weird.

  No, I don’t think it’s a pool. Is it a basement for a new house? A gigantic well? Storage for something?

  Well, it’s Xark’on’s secret, and now he’s digging in the dirt with his bare hands. Not a shovel in sight. Just his tripod with the pulley that multiplies his already huge strength. That’s fine for lifting rocks but not much else. Heck, he eats stew with twigs for cutlery. He may well never have seen a spoon.

  I’ll take my chances with the dragon in that trench. If it appears again, I’ll run up here. I just have to talk to Xark’on and give him a tip. Or maybe two.

  He gives me a sideways glance when I come up to him. “I thought Caroline would go home to tribe.”

  “And I will. But look at this.” I squat down where he’s cleared the vegetation from the ground and use my fingertip to draw the outline of a shovel in the clay. “See this?”

  “A hammer.”

  “No. A shovel. Okay… So, this is seen from the side. This wider part is flat. The rest is the shaft, and it’s long and round. Like your—” I almost point to his crotch. “Um, like the shaft of your hammer,” I quickly catch myself. “But thicker. Like my arm.”

  “And?”

  “And. With a shovel, you can dig easier. Like this.” I start 'digging' with an invisible shovel to show him how it’s done. “See? You can stay mostly upright, and then you can throw the dirt far away. It’ll be much faster. The shovel can take much more dirt each time than you can in your hands.”

  He scratches his chin. “It looks like one big hand. Stiff and flat.”

  “Yes! One big hand that has room for a lot of dirt. The blade should be iron.”

  I have a sudden flashback to our summer cabin in Norway and my dad many years ago trying to dig a drainage trench around it so the water wouldn’t seep into the foundation. “Oh, and the tip should be pointy. Like this.” I steeple my fingers to show him what I mean. “And the top of the blade should be flat. I mean the part nearest you. Flat so that you can step on it and drive it further into the ground. I actually think that’s one of the points with a shovel.”

  “Iron is hard to get.”

  “Yes. I know. But you have a hammer that I’ve only seen you use once. And it can’t be that useful to you for this digging stuff. That head is all iron, right? Shave off four pounds of it and turn it into a shovel.”

  He takes his sledgehammer from his belt and looks at it as if he sees it for the first time. The head is just a huge block of iron, and it seems unnecessarily large to me. He could probably get enough iron from that to make a shovel and a cooking stove and a decent-sized car without it getting significantly smaller. “This was my father’s hammer.”

  “Ah. And I see you have another one, too?”

  He takes out the smaller hammer he left his treehouse with today. It’s about half the size of the big one. “I do.”

  “And do you need two hammers for this project?”

  He scratches his head. “No.”

  “If you change your mind about the shovel, you can always turn the whole thing into a hammer again. Or an ax. Or a stove for your treehouse.”

  He frowns at me, but there’s a little smile playing on his lips. “Caroline has many ideas.”

  And of course, that vague praise from this spectacular man has me blushing. “Sometimes. I try not to make a habit of it.” Oh, for fuck’s sake. What’s that supposed to mean?

  “I have been worried about the time this would take,” Xark’on admits. “Will your shovel make me more effective?”

  “Yes. A lot more. That alone will probably halve the time needed. Or cut it even more. Actually—”

  I cut myself off as I take a moment to think. I’m about to offer to help him with this. And I don’t even know what it is. If he’s building some kind of stone age weapon of mass destruction, then I’m out.

  “Actually,” I continue, “I think I could give you more ideas about how to do this faster. But I must know what it is that you’re making.”

  “It’s a trap,” he says without hesitation, making me think he really wants my help. “Troga has been terrorizing my tribe. I want to trap her and kill her. And this is where it will happen.”

  13

  - Caroline -

  “So not a pool, then.”

  “A pool?”

  “Never mind.” Yeah, this is a project I can get behind. That dragon had a really menacing presence. I mean, the other dinos just do what they do because attacking anything that moves is how they get food. This dragon had more of an evil air to it. Like it hunted and burned us because it enjoyed it.

  I will totally help Xark’on catch that thing and make the jungle safer.

  Sure, it will keep me close to him for another day or maybe two. But of course, that was not a factor in my decision. No, no. Not at all. No matter how his forearms swell when he puts his hammer back in his belt. Or how his butt flexes inside those pants.

  “There’s a forge not far from the treehouse,” he says. “It hasn’t been used for a long time. The tribesmen don’t go into the jungle while Troga is alive. We will go there, and I will forge a shovel. Do you know how to forge iron?”

  His question is totally sincere. Like he thinks Earth linguistics chicks often moonlight as blacksmiths.

  “I’ll just watch you,” I suggest. “I left my anvil at home.”

  But he’s obviously holding me in very high regard, and I’m really flattered.

  He nods very seriously. Then he smirks a little and knocks on the head of his hammer. “This weighs five times as much as one Caroline. Maybe better if I do it.”

  I nod thoughtfully. “Maybe.”

  We walk back the way we came. But for the first time, he turns around to see if I’m following him. Somehow, that little gesture sends a warm little surge to my heart.

  And to my pussy. Because it looks like he has a permanent bulge in his pants. Gods, he’s hot in such an innocent way, like a man who discovers lust for the first time and has no idea what to do with it.

  Maybe someone should show him.

  It’s not that I’m an expert. That fucking depression that hits me at uneven intervals made any kind of romance almost impossi
ble. And uninteresting. Nothing matters when I fall down that black sinkhole. But I’ve had one or two relationships. I could show this guy how to do it.

  Kissing, at least. I was pretty good at that. I think. Way back when.

  So we’re walking again, me admiring Xark’on’s back and butt, and him striding with more confidence now that he has his sledgehammer. He reminds me a little of Thor, except he has darker hair. And stripes. Green, vivid stripes that are in fact incredibly sexy, now that I’m allowing myself to think in those terms. Like he’s always wearing war paint. It makes his alienness more pronounced, which is good, because his behavior is totally human. Except more so.

  I can’t get over how quickly he’ll accept my suggestions and let me show him stuff. He has a real thirst for knowledge, like most of the guys I liked. And he’s willing to set his ego aside for it. It may be just me, but I always thought there was something so manly about that.

  Or maybe he accepted my shovel suggestion just because he wants me to hang around. That works, too. When I think of the cave, I get a heavy, gray feeling. Not that there’s anything wrong with the girls, but the hopelessness back there is making life feel a little stagnant, and I’m more and more alone about it as the other girls keep marrying these cavemen. Here, with Xark’on, I don’t have to think about being stuck. I can stay in his bubble of safety and admire his actions and his energy and his presence and his confidence and his treehouse.

  I really didn’t want to fall for this guy. And I’m not sure that’s what’s happening. But I like him, I want to be close to him, and he turns me on.

  I look around and ahead. I suddenly don’t like the way we’re going.

  I walk faster and catch up with Xark’on. “This is close to where Troga burned you.”

  “The shortest way to the forge goes along her furrow.”

  “Furrow?”

  He stops and points to the side, and I take a couple of steps to the left to see what he means. Ah. Beyond the bushes, there’s a steep hill going down. Just like the one we desperately scrambled up yesterday, when we escaped the dragon. And down there is a smooth, glassy trench that pretty much has to be the same one where the dragon was yesterday. Or very similar.

  It’s not just glassy, I realize. It is glass. As if some great heat has melted the sand and turned it into a mottled, yellowish layer of glass.

  From here, it looks like it continues far ahead and also far back. And it seems to be branching off in many directions, a little like a maze consisting of deep, wide trenches dug into the ground.

  “Is that her furrow?”

  Xark’on has his hand on his hips and scouts up and down the groove. “She never leaves it.”

  “No? Then how does she terrorize your tribe?”

  “When she first arrived, she burned the first furrow. It happened right next to our village, burning six tribesmen to death. She sometimes stands in her furrow and makes certain sounds that penetrate the ears in unpleasant ways. Our lives are less good because of it.”

  “Can’t you move the village?”

  He sighs. “Not easily. The location is very good, and we’d prefer to keep it. There’s water and a natural protection on two sides. It’s very hard to move the Lifegivers. And we’d have to go into the territory of other tribes. There would be war.”

  “Huh. How long has that been going on? I mean, Troga?”

  He turns and walks down from the ridge. “About three seasons.”

  I give the glassy trench a last look and follow him.

  Dealing with time is surprisingly easy here. The cavemen use seasons as their main measure of time passing, and one season is the same length here as three Earth months. Delyah says that the moon Yrf is pretty different from Earth’s moon, except it too completes one orbit of Xren in thirty days. Three seasons is nine Earth months, or about how long the girls and I have been here on Xren. Feels like lots of strange things happened here around the time we arrived.

  We keep following the scorched trench as it snakes through the vibrant jungle like a deep burn. That dragon’s fire has to be pretty hot if it can burn its way through the ground all the way down to the sand layer and then turn the sand to glass. The soil is mostly old organic material, of course, thousands of years’ worth of fallen leaves and dead trees and insects and dinosaurs and bacteria. But still, it would take gigantic heat to actually burn this groove through it—

  I suddenly freeze in my tracks. There’s a sound from down there in the trench. A thin, little sound, like from a lost little puppy. I’ve never seen any animals even remotely resembling dogs here, but that sound can’t be anything else. Unless it’s a human baby.

  I walk back to the rim of the trench. It’s steep and rounded, and I can’t see what’s at the bottom on this side. The trench has a U-shaped cross-section.

  There’s another little whimper, so thin and scared it just about breaks my heart. There’s definitely a young creature down there somewhere. I inch slowly closer to the edge. I’ve got one foot on the smooth, dirty brown glass now, leaning over the edge, but still I can’t quite see.

  I inch a little closer, leaning out. I can almost see this side of the bottom now. Just another inch…

  My foot slides on the glass as if it’s been greased. I yelp as I struggle with my balance and realize I can’t recover. Then, a thick bar of something hard catches me from behind and knocks the wind out of me as it pulls me back, fast.

  Then, I’m sitting on the grass among the trees, struggling for air with Xark’on standing over me. He leans down, drags me into a sitting position, and slaps my back once with exactly the right force to let me breathe again.

  “Thank you,” I wheeze, not quite able to make sense of what happened, but he saved me from falling into the glassy groove. “There’s something down there.”

  “There is,” Xark’on agrees. “We call it Troga.”

  For a moment, I luxuriate in being able to breathe. “No, no. Not the monster. Something else. A baby or something.”

  He takes my hand and gently drags me up to a standing position. Then he points. “There’s your baby.”

  A dark shape comes out from behind a corner down in the trench. And yeah, that’s not a puppy. That’s the dragon. A chill goes down my back.

  “It’s devious,” Xark’on informs me as if I’m a child. “It can make the sound of a little creature. We lost two tribesmen to that before we understood. They thought one of the tribe’s small boys had fallen down there.”

  It’s not huge from this angle, just about the size of a hatchback car. That makes it a small-sized dinosaur on Xren. It’s also much more beautiful and better proportioned. But somehow, that also makes it more menacing. The usual dinos are just scary. This thing chills me down to the bone in the same way that the dactyls do. It has an air of evil.

  Another sound reaches us. This sounds almost like a chuckle, like the one I heard the first time I saw this thing. It’s a laugh that says ‘you got away this time, but I’ll get you yet’.

  Gods, it’s beautiful, though. That rainbow shimmer all over it, those eyes with a light in them, a stronger light than the caveman have in theirs. It moves with such elegance, making a prowling panther seem clumsy.

  It’s sad that it appears to be trapped down there in the trench. Perhaps, if it were helped up from there, it would turn out to be really nice—

  There’s a hand over my eyes, and I’m filled with sudden anger that someone would deprive me of the sight of the dragon.

  “Don’t look too long. It will use its magic to freeze you until it’s close enough to burn you.”

  Shit. The flash of anger is gone in the same moment. I was totally taken in, there, and the dragon is now much closer.

  Xark’on takes my hand and pulls me away from the brink. I like the feel of his hand around mine. It’s rough but warm.

  We walk fast into the jungle again, while the dragon’s chuckle gets weaker behind us.

  “I’m sorry,” I say weakly. “It just sound
ed like a small animal.”

  Xark’on squeezes my hand. “Several tribesmen died like that. It’s a wily Big.”

  “It feels like I’m being nothing but trouble for you.”

  “Troga is trouble,” he says sincerely. “The jungle is trouble. Especially for those who are new to it. Caroline is not trouble. Caroline is a woman with a lot of secret knowledge.”

  I squeeze him back in silent thanks. Gods, he just saved my life twice in two minutes, and he still doesn’t blame me. So of course, I’m so moved I have to wipe my eyes.

  “Thank you for saving me. Again. That dragon is the scariest thing I’ve seen. Worse than irox.”

  He lets go of my hand. “Irox are worse. They can fly. And there are many of them.”

  We finally walk out of the jungle and up a stony hill. There’s a little hut right by a rusty-brown, rocky hillside that looks like a quarry. A little creek trickles down the hill, looking pretty red and muddy. But there is some much lighter soil further away, and that interests me.

  Xark’on points. “There’s iron in the hills. Before Troga, the tribesmen would often come here to forge weapons and other items. Now, only I come here.”

  “The others are too afraid?”

  “They don’t like the sounds from Troga. Now you know what those sounds are. And the furrow is right over there.”

  I can see the trench about a quarter mile away, and I discreetly turn my back to it. “So now you’ll make the shovel?”

  He walks into the wooden hut, but I stay outside. “First, I have to fire up the forge. It must be very hot. Then Caroline must eat.”

  He tosses me his sack, and inside I find various meats and veggies wrapped in leaves. I start munching on them, and then I go into the dark little hut and hand some food to Xark’on. He accepts it and just puts a whole slice of turkeypig into his mouth, chewing happily as he arranges various tools and things around his forge where the fire is already burning.

  “What’s that?” I point to a thing he keeps stepping on, like a pedal. It makes a hissing noise.