Girl Vs (Sinister Skies Book 1)

by Xela Culletto

  A little sheepishly, I realized I’d just burst into their campsite, yelled at them, and then eaten all their food.

  Slightly more cordially I asked, “So what are you doing out here?”

  “Heading to Springfield, which I guess is what you’re doing too.”

  “Is that the name of that city?” I gestured toward the glow in the sky.

  “Yeah,” she replied. “At least that’s what we started out doing. John’s gotten a little sidetracked.”

  The way she said it—with a strain of concern—sounded an alarm bell in my head. John didn’t even look up from knife he’d now been sharpening for at least fifteen minutes straight. It was like he was a professional ignorer.

  “Sidetracked?”

  “Well, he’s been working on a project,” she said slowly, “trying to further alien-human communication.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, as if the person we were discussing wasn’t sitting five feet away.

  “He’s been working with one, trying to figure out a way to correspond with it.”

  “Correspond with it?” I shrieked, directing my words at John. “They’re not your old great-aunts, you know.”

  “Keep your voice down,” he replied. “Yelling upsets him.”

  My eyebrows rose and my jaw dropped. I glanced at Vanessa, who was wearing a worried expression.

  “Him? It’s a him? How do you even know? And where is it?” I peered into the darkness, trying to make out any shape other than grass and trees, but couldn’t see anything. My eyes had adjusted to the firelight, and everything else was dark.

  “He’s restrained—to that tree there. But don’t go over there—he’s still dangerous.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” I said sarcastically. “How do you know he won’t break free and come kill us all?”

  “Scientific advancement was never made without risk.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered.

  I gave Vanessa my best this-guy-is-nuts-and-he’s-going-to-get-us-killed look, and she nodded a little in return. She was definitely perturbed by the whole thing. But then she subtly put her finger to her mouth, urging me to drop the matter. She was probably right—it was never a good idea to provoke the maniacs.

  It turned out that John had a compass, so they did their traveling by day. They had just been about to turn in for the night when I had shown up. Both of them had one of those super-deluxe backpacks that carried way more than it looked like it could, including a sleeping bag.

  I watched enviously as Vanessa spread hers next to the fire. John offered me a jacket to drape over myself, which I accepted, using my backpack for a pillow, and we went to sleep. Sort of. Every sound roused me, certain the John’s alien had broken free and was upon us. But it was my imagination every time.

  I was sitting up when the sun rose. The morning was still and I could hear every insect buzz and every bird call. The other two were still asleep. I wondered what sort of breakfast foods they had tucked away in their backpacks.

  Standing up so I could stretch properly, something caught the corner of my eye. It was a horse! Lucky was grazing, still saddled and bridled, only a stone’s throw away.

  I approached him cautiously.

  “Hey boy,” I said soothingly. “You made it.”

  His head rose when he heard me, and he seemed a little alarmed, but he allowed me to grab the reins. Looking him over carefully, I found a few small cuts and scrapes on his rear legs, but other than that he appeared unharmed. Lucky indeed. I guided him back to the fire pit, which was now stone cold. The sound of our approach woke my campmates.

  “Where’d you get that?” John asked in surprise, for once showing an emotion other than surliness.

  “I took him from one of the houses—back in the city.”

  “He trained?”

  “Yep. I rode him most of the way here.”

  “Good,” John said. “He can carry all our stuff.”

  I frowned. Lucky was mine. It’s not like they had shared their sleeping bags with me last night. I was about to protest when Vanessa caught my eye. With a warning in her eye, she shook her head. I let it drop, for now.

  John and Vanessa packed away their sleeping bags, and busied themselves making oatmeal. I kept glancing at the tree John said he’d tied the Vela to, but it was too far away and still too much in shadow for me to make it out. Following his breakfast, John pulled out a pen, some paper, and a gun, and headed to the tree.

  “So what’s going on?” I asked Vanessa as soon as he was out of earshot.

  She hesitated.

  “He’s… He keeps trying to make friends with it. Like, using rabbit meat to try and train it—‘sit’ and ‘speak’ as if it was a dog. He says if we can learn to communicate we’ll find a way to make peace with them.”

  “Peace? I think they’ve made it pretty clear they didn’t fly halfway across the galaxy for peace.”

  “I know. It gets worse. He says they chose him—specifically him—to lead ‘the humans’ to reconciliation. When we get to the city—which, by the way, he plans on bringing that Vela with us—he says he’s going to lead the people into a human-Vela unification.”

  “Wow,” I said slowly. “He really has lost it.”

  Or maybe he never had it. What did Vanessa or I really know about John? Neither of us had met him before the cave. He might very well have been a psychopath.

  It was kind of weird, talking to Vanessa so companionably. All our exchanges before had been contentious. But I guessed being on our own way out in the middle of nowhere changed things.

  “At first I argued with him,” she continued, “tried to make him see logic. But that only upset him and made him even more determined. So now I’m just following along until we can reach Springfield.”

  “You really think there are people there?”

  She sighed deeply. “I don’t know.”

  “But the light—that has to mean something, right?”

  “I hope so.” She sighed again. “For now, though, we need to do our best not to upset John. He’s pretty good out here, and he has the guns, so I figure the best thing is to stick by his side for now.”

  I didn’t like her logic. Sticking by the side of a known killer, who seemed to be coming unhinged, sounded like a bad idea to me. If I had come across John alone out here, I would have backed away and left. But Vanessa seemed to think he was the source of safety, rather than the danger. I didn’t understand it. Then again, I’d never been very good at understanding how human relationships work.

  Chapter 10

  Two girls, a guy, and an alien walk into a bar. The bartender yells, “Hey, you can’t just Martian here without ID!”

  Okay, the joke was lame. But I felt I should get credit for even trying. Things were pretty bleak. We’d been walking for three hours in the unforgiving sunlight. John had the stupid alien tied to the end of a wooden pole, and had been marching it (and us) without stop. Lucky had been demoted to packhorse. When I’d argued about it, John had said dismissively, “You wanna travel with me, you do what I say.”

  I didn’t want to travel with him; if I’d had any food at all, I would have left, lickity-split. But I was a slave to my stomach, and my stomach was a slave to his food, for now. It couldn’t take more than a few days before we would reach our destination. Surely I could handle anything for a few days. Even walking next to a disgusting, hateful creature that smelled like week-old baby spit-up.

  The Vela, or “Rex”, as John had taken to calling it, was clearly a very unhappy hostage. It lashed out at anything that got within claws-reach, refused the offered food, and was ceaselessly groaning. In only a couple of hours the sound had become white noise to me. That’s not to say I’d become tolerant to its presence—my fingers twitched toward my knives every time it came within ten feet.

  “Tell me again why you’re dragging that thing along,” I said, as John strained to pull the alien away from Lucky. For the most part, I thought my horse wa
s handling the presence of the predator pretty well. He walked as far as I would let the lead rope out, and his eyes still rolled whenever “Rex” got too close, but at least he’d stopped trying to take off every two seconds.

  “Like I said,” John grunted, pulling aggressively on the pole, “we have to find a means of communication. Then we can come to an understanding with them.”

  “I’ll tell you what it’s communicating,” I said. “It’s telling you to let it go so it can kill us all. Doesn’t take a degree to figure that one out.”

  John scowled. “You’ve got to think bigger, Rhyan. They’re not mindless savages. They flew across the galaxy at light-speed, for one thing. Do you have any idea how much science that takes?”

  My gut reaction was to respond sarcastically, but I swallowed that and instead asked, “So why do you think they came?”

  He didn’t respond for a moment. I watched as he checked the rope knot at his waist. Not only had he restrained the alien with the pole tether, but he also had a rope connecting one of its’ appendages to him. That way, he’d said, if the tether gets jerked from my hands, it can’t escape. He really had to be crazy. But that rope also meant the creature would go after John first when it got loose, while Lucky and I ran for it, so I didn’t argue.

  “They’re here so we can be tested,” he said finally.

  He didn’t elaborate so I prompted him.

  “Tested?”

  “Yes. They’re measuring our value. If we can prove it to them, they’ll take us to learn the secrets of the universe.”

  I nearly choked on that—secrets of the universe. But I wanted to hear more of his thoughts. Who knew? Maybe he was right. Aliens and crazy had always held company, even before the invasion.

  “So they’re testing us by—killing us?”

  “Ever heard of ‘survival of the fittest’?”

  Ever heard of murder?

  “So how do you know all this?” I asked.

  “I’ve been working with Rex. He’s learned to understand some verbal language, but the better way to communicate with him is with drawings. I show him drawings and we work from there.”

  I wondered what “Rex” really thought of John’s behavior. It was true, they weren’t stupid animals—you could tell by the calculated way they moved and the knowing look in their eyes. But I’d killed too many of them to want to consider them as anything more. I glanced at Vanessa, who’d been silent all day.

  “Why do you think they’re here?”

  She looked at me, eyes full of solemn sadness. “I have no idea. I just wish they’d leave.”

  “You won’t feel that way once they decide to teach us,” John said.

  Vanessa shot him a menacing glare, and opened her mouth to reply, but before she could, something caught my eye.

  “Larkspur!”

  “What?” Vanessa asked.

  “Look—over there!” I pointed. “It’s larkspur!”

  “And I care because…?”

  I turned to John.

  “Listen to me. You’ve been fighting that thing this whole time, using up way more energy than you need to. That larkspur—it will help. Give some to it, and it’ll become way more docile. That’s what I used before, when I would go out hunting. It works pretty much instantaneously.”

  “You want me to drug Rex?”

  “It’ll help,” I insisted. “We could go a lot faster, and then it won’t be as big of a threat.”

  I waited while John considered. I knew he didn’t like the idea of drugging the Vela, but he was obviously tired of fighting with it too.

  “All right,” he relented. “But only a little.”

  Leaving Lucky’s reins with Vanessa, I ran toward the small patch of purple flowers and carefully picked a bundle.

  “Just throw it so it touches it anywhere. They’re way sensitive to it,” I ordered after running back.

  John looked at the plant doubtfully.

  “Are you sure it won’t kill him? We need him alive.”

  You want it alive, I thought. If it was up to me it’d be maggot food.

  “Just give it a try,” I said. “It just makes them groggy is all.”

  The alien was moaning and swaying its loathsome head back and forth, blue froth flying from its mouth.

  “Here,” I said, since John was still mulling it over. “I’ll do it.”

  Carefully crumpling the flowers into a ball, I tossed it at the beast. The monster bellowed and shied away from the ball, but it was too late. The reaction was instant. Its head ceased the incessant swaying, and slumped a few inches; small boils began popping up where the ball had hit it. The spasmodic movements that had been so habitual became slow, like a lumbering tortoise.

  “You’d better be right about this,” John said.

  “It’ll be fine,” I replied.

  Vanessa was looking at me warily.

  “You sure seem to have a knack for this sort of stuff,” she said. “It’s like you were born for this world.”

  Her words hit me like a wall. She’d probably meant it as a compliment, but it was the worst insult anyone could say to me. I was not born for this world. I was born for the world where my father and my brother and I spent every Sunday night watching movies. I was not meant to be traipsing through the middle of nowhere with a couple of strangers and a homicidal alien. No one was meant for this world. How could she say something like that?

  I sighed deeply while John began marching the much-more-cooperative alien forward. I pulled on Lucky’s lead line and we began followed.

  It was true that I hadn’t been much before the invasion—a below-average student who wasn’t particularly pretty, or athletic, or musical, or in possession of any other talent that gets people’s attention. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t meant for that world—that my talents could only be found in the hunting, killing, and evading of aliens. This wasn’t my world. Vanessa was wrong.

  Eventually the sun lowered enough that John called for us to set up camp. Vanessa began starting a fire while I untacked Lucky. I sat on a rock holding his lead rope while he grazed contentedly in the evening light. I watched as John pushed his miserable prisoner about thirty yards away and shackled it to a tree.

  Enjoy the sunset, you vile creature, I thought. It’s going to be your last.

  Chapter 11

  Night fell.

  John was snoring away in his sleeping bag, and Vanessa was restless in hers. It was late and I was pretty sure she was actually asleep, despite the tossing and turning. She’d been a troubled sleeper in the cave, too.

  The night was clear, with the moon shining down so brightly I could make out individual blades of grass. Crickets chirped, and a light breeze blew at the last threads of smoke from the campfire. The air was starting to get chilly.

  Now was the time.

  I prepared silently, unsheathing my knives and unpocketing the larkspur I’d hidden. I tightened the laces on my boots and began making my way toward the monster. Lucky, who’d been tied to a nearby tree branch with a length of rope, lifted his head when he noticed me, but thankfully stayed silent.

  I crept quickly, anxious to have this over with. I’d never killed before when my prey had been helplessly bound. Surely that will just make it easier, I told myself.

  But something about attacking a trapped animal didn’t sit right with me. Then again, something about aliens that traveled zillions of miles just to come kill my family didn’t sit right with me either.

  My jaw set; the grip on my knives tightened. I was close enough now that I could see the beast: it was hunched over the rope that cinched it to the tree. It might have been sleeping, but since I’d never seen the monsters asleep before, it was hard to say. Maybe they didn’t even need to.

  I crumpled the larkspur into a tight, throwable sphere, wistfully thinking of the darts that were probably still sitting in the cave. The alien must have sensed me, close as I was, but didn’t move. My hand drew back, preparing to throw.

  “I
knew you couldn’t be trusted,” a voice rose from behind me.

  I whirled around to see John standing behind me, gun raised. My hands went up instinctively, a gesture of appeasement.

  “John,” I hissed. “What are you doing here?”

  “Stopping you,” he said without blinking. “I won’t let you hurt my friend.”

  The gun, which was pointed directly at my head, didn’t waver a bit.

  He was going to kill me.

  “It’s not what you think,” I said, backing away slowly, knives and hands still in the air.

  “Stop moving,” he ordered.

  I didn’t. There was a psychotic look in his eye that alarmed a primitive instinct inside me. He was beyond reasoning. I only had one chance of getting out of this alive; he’d left me with no other choice.

  I took one more step backward, then spun around and leapt to the side of the Vela. The second I moved, John let off a shot, which whizzed by my left ear. The blast roused the monster, which raised its head and, to my relief, its claws. John chased around to get a clearer shot.

  Fast as I could, I sawed through the rope. The second the pressure fell from the restraints, the alien surged forward. Directly at John.

  John, the fool, didn’t fire. It was a point blank shot, but even as the beast got fifteen feet away, ten feet, five feet, he didn’t shoot. He was trying to talk to it, but the sounds were so garbled I couldn’t make out the words. Then the Vela was on top of him, slicing away. John’s screams rose into the night, but they only lasted a moment.

  Two seconds later, the monster turned from its victim, searching for me. I was ready for it, and pitched the larkspur directly toward its middle. The mark was hit, and the Vela crumpled over, rendering it momentarily helpless. It only took a second to finish what I’d set out to do and then the stench of alien innards filled the air.

  A light from the campsite broke through the night, peering toward me. The noise must have roused Vanessa.

  I walked over and inspected the body that was now spilling enough blood to create a small stream. It didn’t take a doctor to proclaim the diagnosis.